After being hit on at Barnes & Noble

I received a compliment

(or something resembling one)

between the aisles of Poetry and Fiction

at Barnes & Noble, from a wannabe representative of Smooth Talkers Anonymous:

Far too pretty to be reading books.

I wonder how many tragic young women,

digging through Plath and Dickinson

in search of validation, would allow themselves to be flattered by this drivel?

How many would allow this blatant chauvinism

to infiltrate their hard-won rooms of their own?

I think of my teenage self,

curve-less and wiry-haired,

unpopular, yet proud to admit
that the love of my life is named Gilbert,
and you may not have heard of him
because he lives in a book.

Therein was the real reason I was single
for so long, but nonetheless satisfied

with who I was. I saw the world through fiction,

allowing me to avoid the real-life villains

with the hope that,

if characters are created by humans,

surely they can be embodied by
real humans, too.

"Too pretty" to be reading books,
you say?

Too bad.

The most attractive man (I think)

is a man well-read.