Your Smile

by Kyla Alterman

The day belonged to
a fallen ice cream cone.
The simple pleasure that tumbled
leaving cookie dough to mingle
with chips of dirt,
rainbow sprinkles to scatter
like carnival ants.

And the girl who had tried
so hard today
to keep her eyes averted
from the gray, blank sky
couldn’t help thinking
how she did even the simplest of things wrong
as a passerby’s heel
grazed her vanilla puddle
and began forging a sticky trail
into the distance.

She bent over,
scooping up what she could.
Someone once taught her
it was rude to leave your loose ends
strewn for others to see,
so her lips were often bent into a smile.
The lonely boy in class told her
she smiled to much— how odd.
No one should be that happy.

No one ever is

The girl had a persisting headache
for months
she’d gone walking about
trying to pretend she wasn’t driven insane
by the pressure bursting in her skull
and the conflicting ideas of what to become,
how best to make her imprint
through her many facades created out of fear.
She often pictured her eulogy:
who in the pews could say they truly knew her?


She painted herself to look a certain part
hoping meaning and experience
would follow suit
rip through the gray, blank sky
like the image of his now unattainable smile
that persisted daily in her memory.
The day belonged to
scraping ice cream off the cold pavement,
trying to shake a feeling.