“if insecure girls date closet gays,

what kind of girl does it take . . .?”

by mikaella antonio

the boy with the pet snake in his room dyed his hair pink in the middle of june,

and you, the neighborhood girl on skates, always wearing skirts and daisy chains,

literally crashed into him doing spirals around a cul-de-sac.

he helped you up and apologized for your crushed daisies and scraped knees,

and that was when you feel deeply in the spell of a first, very insecure young love.

you suffered so cleanly that you forgot altogether

his roseate, flamingo feather hair and bony wrists flicking selected words back into the air.

you wanted so badly to be kissed-

you didn’t even consider that he might have only been in it to know what he’d look like with the strawberry lemon gloss of your lips on his.

you loved so shallow that it didn’t seem to matter until he stole your fairy dust glitter eye-shadow and flirted with your older brother,

who lodged his fist so sharply into your boy’s solar plexus that his girlish scream woke the entire house.

your father just kicked him out

(“get out of my house, son.”)

in a voice he never used except when your mother cried.

never even said a word about

sneaking boys in at night.

just kicked him out,

even held the door open for

slumped shoulders, smeared mascara,

shame dragging his feet two blocks back to his house.

poor darling,

you wanted so blindly to be wanted.