Days My Poems Go Far Away
I pray for monsoonal wordfalls that succumb to ravishing sunlight. Similes pool in echoing
canyons, soak into rocks, become slate shadows cooling collared lizards. I see my words in
aviator shades these lizards wear, double rainbowed, ricocheting off apricot sun. I clang the tiny
lenses like cymbals till rocks reverberate. Canyon bats, slick tuxedoed vampires upside down,
fold wings over my words, press them to throbbing chests. Make them blood thirsty. Then set
them free to stripe themselves around and around a cat’s ringed tail, letters getting cozy dancing
circles. Dancing. Circles dancing. Circles. When they’re dizzy, they spin off to clouds of
cayenne dust. Birds-of-prey swoop and grab them inches from the ground, hang glide them miles above boulders, drop them when they realize: They. Never. Die. My darlings plummet and crash among sinisterly grinning scorpions, positive they’ll surrender hopeless and scared, but they escape, muster power as they huddle. Enjamb into nightfall. Adjectives spread quilted bodies over shivering nouns. Weary words count bighorn sheep but can’t drift to sleep without order. So I coax them into zombie stanzas, coo and cajole them to extend metaphors, link arms with caesuras. The Big Dipper pours vanilla chamomile as lines blur in somnambulist trance. It’s time to poet these words home, peer into their yellow marble mountain lion eyes, stroke their shaggy bison beards, kiss their ears with promises to never unmother again.
Dana Kinsey is an actor and teacher published in Drunk Monkeys, ONE ART, On the Seawall, Sledgehammer Lit, West Trestle Review, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, and Prose Online. Dana’s play, WaterRise, was produced at the Gene Frankel Theatre. Her chapbook, Mixtape Venus, is published by I. Giraffe Press. Visit wordsbyDK.com
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