“You’re beautiful,” he says,
his voice a gin-soaked amalgamation of every
listlessly aging boss,
lonely husband in the shoe department,
loveless 3a.m.-hard-cocked stranger.

“Why don’t you smile?”

I widened my eyes
in an attempt to appear likable,
yet felt my mouth
straightening,
my upper lip sealing
the bottom like
a Tupperware lid.

I willed them to curl
upwards, unassumingly;
I wanted to smile the way
women seem to smile
while masking
ill-fitting intentions.

My mouth remained
firmly rooted,
obstinate railroad tracks running
the shortest distance
between the two plotted points of
left cheek and right cheek.

Behind these pretty lips lay
two rows of crooked teeth,
a cigarette-stained skyline
against the starless horizon of
tongue and epithelial tissue, ugly
and wholly my own.

To smile
would be a betrayal
of my own trust,
and if any man
were worth that
it certainly wasn’t
this one.