TheJkinz • Josh Kinney

This is a poem about a great, impossible, and forbidden love. In the realist’s sense of the world, it’s impractical and never meant to be. Oceans, countries, and continents stand in the way, along with complicated politics and frustrating attempts to obtain visas. Access to one another is, for the most part, blocked by financial differences due to politically affected economies, and a mountain of bureaucracy, yet for some reason unknown, there remains all the patience in the world. And although they don’t always understand each other, somehow they always do, perhaps in a way that surpasses language itself. Society demonizes such a collusion, seeing them as enemy nations conspiring,…

I still don't know why the memories drudge back to the forefront of my mind over two years later.

I was thinking about my first kiss in the middle of a root canal. The dentist and his colleague stood over me, overhead light beaming in my face, tubes and tools cluttering my mouth. It was their conversation that brought me back to the fateful day. “Who sings this song?” my dentist asked his colleague. “It’s really good.” Michelle Branch’s ‘All You Wanted’ played faintly over the room’s sound system. “Uh, I think it’s Christina Aguilera,” the other man replied. I wanted to chime in and correct them but wasn’t in the proper physical state. Instead I relived that evening a few days after my 14th birthday when I saw…