When you woke up in the morning

with the popular kids’ approval crumpled on your bedroom floor

and your feet aching from a stare-way of gazes,

how did you feel after the audience had ghosted you?

Come morning the headline gasps disappeared,

everyone’s gossip draped over your prom dress,

and their pointed tongues tearing apart each pink-stitched seam.

Scrap the yearning love ballads to focus on your patchwork dress

sewn together with your outcast hands and funky second-hand sketches.

They called it the worst part of your love story.

It wasn’t your bottle-logged father lost in your absentee mother’s gaze,

or the sadistic remarks from your under-classed, over-privileged schoolmates,

or a love interest more focused on your novelty than your voice.

Andie, let me ask you,

do you feel your dress was the worst part of the movie?

Or was it the cold shoulder audience?

The second best ending?

When they exchanged your best friend Duckie for another basic rich boy.

They scribbled out the one person

who fought the Miami Vice haircuts for your mismatched honor

and understood the beauty of living on the wrong side of the bleachers.

Andie, I think the unfavorable part of the movie wasn’t the dress-

but when they traded your happy ending for a lukewarm storyline

that wouldn’t last past the credits.

The studio focused on thumbs up profits,

and pandered to young woman fairy tale ratings

instead of love stories with friends.

~

Amanda Hawk is Best of the Net-nominated and Pushcart Prize-nominated Poet. She lives in Seattle between the roaring planes and the city’s neon lights. Amanda has been published in several journals including Rogue Agent and the winnow magazine. Recently, she placed second in the 2024 Seattle Crypticon Horror Short Story contest.