I Carry My Father’s Smile and My Mother’s Fire

Prose Poetry

Photo by Juli Kosolapova on Unsplash

Look in the mirror, little girl, and spy that familiar smile. You don’t have to like it — don’t even have to flash it like a warning sign — but use it wisely. When people tell you to smile, you may use it as a weapon that probably worked better in your father’s hands.

Try, though you may, not to think of him — you still face the things you don’t like at all. His nose, his porous skin, his muddled cheeks too keen to flush. You are a study in the complex emotional burden of seeing everything you dislike from a man you do not respect. You don’t realize how many daughters carry this same struggle, all tied up in the blood and marrow and heart of who they are.

But it does not have to be all bad. See there? Your eyes are not dull like the watery blue of your father’s gaze. There is a spark in their depths, an underlying power that is yours to unleash if you so wish. Those eyes stare back at you in the mirror, and they gleam like they are diamonds harvested from the deepest caves.

You can be fire, if you want. You can be water, if you choose that path instead. Why does there have to be a dichotomy of good or bad? Why can’t it just be — whoever you want to be?

Stare and try to stargaze in the midnight sky you see in that glass. Maybe you can chart a…