
Smile More
Poem by Meggie Hollinger
Illustration by Jane Hawthorne
I keep a list
of comebacks
for when you tell me
I should smile more
I obsess over
showing you
how a sharp tongue
can whip your head around
faster
than the thickest, juicy, apple booty
your rude ass has ever seen
I keep a cast
of salty looks
where I purse my lips.
hollow my cheeks.
make to spit
but hold it in
Because I want nothing that can trace you back to me
But in the moment
When you go “cluck”
my heart sinks
and my cheeks get hot
and I do the thing when I can't stop blinking
Cause I feel supremely embarrassed
Like this is some kind of prank.
And the feeling reminds me of a time
Before I knew what beauty was
And who decides if I am with or without it
So when you interrupt my thoughts like
HEY
ARE YOU ALONE
LET ME CHANGE THAT
CAUSE I THINK I LOVE YOU, BABY
Without thinking the thing I say is
LOVE YOURSELF
And as I walk away in my head is a chorus
of all the things I could have said, or should have said,
that would have
what
reversed centuries of social conditioning
that now makes it acceptable for you to shout
BABY across the street to someone you don’t know?
As I round the corner I throw in
I HOPE YOUR MOTHER’S PROUD OF YOU
and I know he’s making some excuse
for why I bit back
Probably calling me a
STUPID BITCH
but I see right through it
because we all know it aches to be scalded by something
too hot to touch
I call up my best friend
and as the phone rings I tell myself
it’s okay to feel violated
by something so unwelcome
like stepping through shit
because if she just saw that
she would be fucking mad
for real