Dana Kinsey is a writer, actor, and teacher published in Writers Resist, One Art, Broadkill Review, Fledgling Rag, Silver Needle Press, For Women Who Roar’s 2020 Anthology, Porcupine Literary, Sledgehammer Lit, West Trestle Review, Prose Online, Tweetspeak, and Teaching Theatre.  She is the director of The Spartan Writing Lab at Saint Mark’s High School in Wilmington, DE.  Dana's play, WaterRise, was produced at the Gene Frankel Theatre for the Radioactive Women’s Festival. Her first poetry collection, Mixtape Venus, will be published by I. Giraffe Press in 2022.

Visit wordsbyDK.com.



 

To My Student Who Cried for the Creature in Frankenstein
 

he wasn’t built with green skin 

bolted temples in a square head

some monstrous urge to kill 

            you knew this going in

 

yes he opened eyes unwanted 

skin stretched, crudely stitched 

over bones too big for him

            you peer and feel and flinch   

 

cast off to villagers terrified

of his power to destroy, doomed

unless they got to him first

            the injustice clear in your eyes

 

weary in abandoned ice caves 

so hungry for companionship

even his own name escaped him

            this hurt you the most

 

            it’s what crushes me too

he wished only for soft good-

night kisses from lips wet with

ocean waves sweet as birdsong

 

            he thought words could save him

which is what I say to you, still,

though these days it sounds closer

to hollow, I know, when even breath is hard

 

            someone should have wanted him

how does a person create another 

without knowing they will hold more 

tightly when lightening lashes the dark 

 

            he wasn’t the real monster

just a newborn soul shoved into a world

that could not see how naturally his fingers curled 

around another hand 

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Originally published in Porcupine Literary