How to Smile


When I was five years old, I liked running to strange men in the park. When you are a woman, sometimes the air cleaves into a pair of hands. You become a spectacle, stacking irises into a routine, subverting what is dangerous by making it circadian. I build a metric around the gaits of city men—who are incapable of strolling, who loop on the pulse of traffic and asynchronous commuter prayers, who emerge from the subway with short cigarettes, carnivorous, working damp starbursts into their crisp, white shirts.

This is the business of the periphery, where my fist is only half-drawn. These are the violently preoccupied men of a girl’s dreams—half white rabbit, flitting through train cars, their faces soft and nondescript. I look for the man who is otherwise, who buffers, face suspended like a yawn. A man with nothing to do, who oozes into doorways and grins, waits for a crowd to bloom and displace the placement of his hands. Years later, I meet a stranger on the internet and his apartment doesn’t have any windows.

When you are a woman, sometimes you give up. You shirk the gospel of the low, unimpeachable hemline and bright, populated space. You feel the greasy fingers in the city’s homeostasis, and understand what is happening to you is just a matter of course. It is not unnatural to share a bed with your natural predator. It’s unnatural to ask that after, your body remain intact. I am working off the debt incurred by my accidental glances at idle men. The men in my family call this way of dining, a compliment. They cape for men they don’t know while I am standing there, counting their teeth. They uphold tradition, say, black girl, lighten up.

But I’d rather be dark. I’d rather press a flame into a smooth, plutonic stone. I’d rather hold that stone inside me, so that upon my dissection, my hysteria can be classified, rolled around in the hand like a single tooth. I’d rather string the roots of my teeth around my neck, so that upon the request of a smile, I am nothing but tongue.

–Raven Leilani (from Pigeon Pages)

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