by Lauren Eden
easier to tear a bird from
the sky with my bare hands.
Maybe it was angels. Maybe
it was simply my survival
instinct kicking in,
knowing that I couldn’t stay
to die with you. I was not
made to stay in that kind of
darkness. If I were, I
would’ve died before my
twelfth birthday. All I knew
was that I was too old and
too strong to let a man take
me down now.
PEACE
Once I felt peace
surging through
my fingertips, I knew
there would never
be a pair of hands
that could tempt me
back into chaos.
PORTAL
Sometimes
when I squint
really hard
I can see myself
in every one
I try to love.
SURVIVAL
I shot myself
in the heart
with Cupid’s arrow
and they called it
a suicide attempt.
They don’t know
a life survival skill
when they see one.
HOPE
That sliver of light
beneath the door—
that one strip of hope
my eyes cling to
in the darkness.
I find it. I always do.
SIMPLE
Life is simple.
Say it.
Then listen
to all those voices,
not your own
interrupting,
trying to complicate it
for you.
YIN AND YANG
I counted on one hand
those who had loved me most
then counted on the other
those who had hurt me the deepest
and when I clasped them
both together
I could see that peace
had come to me at last.
SOFTNESS
Succumb to me.
Leave your battles
with the boys and
let me wrap you up
in the white flag
of my sheets
surrendering you
to a softness
we don’t have to
tell anyone about—
your rough hands
never looked
so gentle
under candlelight.
FRICTION
I’ve lost too much.
I don’t have anything left to burn.
Everything I have now
I fought the wildfires for
and I recognize that friction
in our skin when it touches
that blaze in your eyes
stirring up my ashes.
You are the kind of risk
I just won’t take anymore.
AWAKENING
Waking
can feel like
an inconvenience
when you’d planned
on sleepwalking
through the rest
of your life.
RETURNING
I am returning
slowly
to the hollow
of my oak
finding my way back
through the dark forest of men
their torsos carved with my initials
men
who offered me shelter
from all the storms
that weren’t my own.
But it is time, now.
It is time to come home.
RITUAL
Women might
ebb and flow
like moon tides
but we want a man
to love us like the sun
arriving on time
and always,
always
with breakfast.
STRIP
You ask me why
I like to undress myself
in front of you
and I tell you
it is my only power play
in a world
that is always trying
to undress me
first.
PARADISE
The easy lives
get harder
while the hard lives
get easier
and I can tell you
this ninth life
is a dream.
PRIDE
MINE
I was given
the most valuable
brutal lesson
of them all
and it was this:
I had to leave
the love of my life
to save myself.
I left the love of my life for me.
And in making
that choice
I became
the love of my life.
HIGHER PURPOSE
I caught the one I was made for
red-handed in the garden
dirt on his hands
trying to bury my rib
back into the earth
muttering to God,
She is not what I wanted—
and that was when I knew
that perhaps I was made
for something different
in this life.
Maybe something more.
CONSENT
Our bodies heal without permission,
but our hearts need consent. Give it.
WORTHY
I am worthy of light
of warmth.
The sun tells me so
each morning
no matter
how many times the moon
shrugs her cold shoulders
at me.
BIOLOGY
As a woman
I am always aware
my womb is empty
that I am not filled
but I am starting to know
the difference now
between the pang
of my biology
and the true aching
of loneliness.
OCCUPIED
Claim yourself.
Plant flowers
upon the sill
of your lashes
hang signs
from your mouth
like a door.
Let them know
you are cared for.
Let them know
someone is home.
TOTALITY
There was never another love
I needed more than my own.
PROGRESS
The past is meant to be re-visited
preferably
with a friend
and a glass of wine
opening secrets
like candy wrappers
letting their bittersweet tastes
settle on your tongue
before spitting them
back out again
and that is where you leave it—
you kiss it goodbye.
You never
see it again.
GRACE
I love how butterflies just flap their wings
without needing to talk about it.
MERCY
I am mostly easy to love
but when
I am not
don’t make it
harder on me.
IMMORTAL
It is the crackle you hear
from the fire burning you
down to the ground
that is your spirit;
cracking like a whip
under your skin
still alive
still blazing—
the sound
of your magic.
GOLD
Sometimes
we hand ourselves over
to someone
we love
on a silver platter
and they still don’t want us
and maybe
that is the problem.
We forget we are gold.
LESSONS
I will tell my daughter:
You will be worshipped. The
wrong men will fall at your
feet. You will be demeaned,
envied—by strangers, best
friends, sisters, your
mother. You will not be
seen—your intelligence,
your kindness—overlooked.
You will be bullied, may
become prey to the fathers
of friends, brothers of
friends (you will think it is
your fault).
You may not ever have a
platonic friendship with a
man, but you will be loved
many times over by men.
Many of whom won’t care to
really know you.
But what will make you feel
most alone is being told by
the world that these
problems make you lucky. It
doesn’t. But you mustn’t
downplay your beauty. You
should have fun with it.
Celebrate it. You don’t need
to make excuses for it, but
you do need to be aware of
the effect it has on the
people around you, because
once you are aware of its
effect, you will never take
any reactions to it to
heart. You will set it free.
Only then will you see how
very little it means at all.
COLD
I’ve been told my entire life,
I’m cold
because I’ve never
needed anyone to warm me.
How do they not see the paradox in that?
Now they tell me it is
this kind of aloofness
this indifference
this nonchalance
that makes me cool.
I’ve been a fire this whole time.
REVIVAL
These men
feel like the death of me
and it is always women
over coffee and
over wine
bringing me back
to life again.
HONEST
I look at the moon
and I don’t ask her
how her night’s been.
I know
just by looking at her
that she is not
holding her breath
any more than I am.
IMPOSSIBLE
You give your love away too easily,
that is what
they tell you
and only you know why
because it has always
felt impossible
to give it to yourself.
REVOLUTION
Women are punished
for celebrating their sexuality
when they should be
celebrating with us
that despite the efforts
to get us to hate
our bodies,
we love them—
we enjoy them.
KINGDOM
You think I look
like a queen from the outside?
Well I can assure you
that on
the inside
I am the whole
fucking kingdom.
WILD
I tie myself
into knots over you
thinking of how
your fingers are going
to unravel me,
my clever
big-boy scout.
This is what you’d been
preparing yourself for.
It was never about
learning to survive in the wild.
It was about losing yourself in it.
RAW
You did to me
what I thought
could never be done.
You loved me
and I felt
every
single
bit of it.
SEXUAL HEALING
I smile when we make love now.
I am forgetting the
memories. Washed clean the
touch of my hunters from my
skin. Wiped away the faces I
used to pull like the girls
in those videos. Like I am
in pain. Like I am scared.
Like I really don’t want it.
Covered my ears from all
those Beg for mes and I
want to make you screams.
It tastes like honey. It
feels like sunlight.
SUNSET
I am the light
in your eyes
and I will be
taking it with me
when I leave.
FRIENDSHIP
We talk of men
like we talk of sport,
licking each other’s paws,
lazy stories
falling from our yawns,
and we love them
we really do love them—
but in the way we watch
the hot sun slipping below
the horizon
with relief,
finding as much joy
in their goodbye
as we did in their hello.
READY
A lot can happen in 28 days.
Just ask the moon. In one,
ask the sun.
They say it takes 21 days to
break a habit. But how many
years does it take to
unlearn everything that’s
been taught to you since
you were a child? Love
taught to us by people who
hated themselves.
How many generations will it
take for a man to soak the
war off his skin? How many
more generations will
women have to keep running
the bath—coaxing a man to
bathe in warmth and
softness, letting his wounds
soak in lavender and honey?
They say life moves in seven-
year cycles, and if I marked
mine on a chart, I would lie
on my stomach like a child
with crayons scattered
around me in colors I’ve
never seen before, and I
would paint this fifth one
yellow. Yellow. The color of
sun melting in the sky like
butter. Yellow. The color of
my daughter’s pajamas as
her small foot slides idly
next to mine. Yellow. The
color of the long grass a
lioness crouches low in,
waiting to pounce. That is
me. A lioness. Stalking my
life before it runs away
from me again. I am ready
now. Ready to roar. Ready to
pounce.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
PREY
Liability
Paranoid
Debt
Sport
Heads or Tails
Armor
Teenage Heroes
Quick Fixes
Less
Witch Hunt
Different
D.O.A
Broken Home
Deconstruct
Invaded
Collateral Damage
Roam
Criminals
Edits
Masochism
Clarity
Swallow
Adrift
Prize
Magician
Dark Circles
Young
Damaged
Punch-Drunk
Bruises
Safe
Trampled
Revenge
White Knights
Tangled
Want
Mutual
Together
Fix
CAPTIVITY
Starved
First
Too Close
Open
Tiny
Chase
Cold
Spray Paint
Tears
Migrate
Condiments
Half-Caf
Stained
Share
Free
Trust
Capricious
Good Girl
Sticky Situations
Strange
Naked
The Princess and the Pea
Q&A
Notice
Flipside
Paradox
Circles
Light
Lost
Hover
Commit
Shared
Advice
SHARPENING THE CLAWS
Taste
Natural
Reflections
Fed
Imagination
Fairytales
Leave
Afraid
Dominance
Marked
No
Substitute
Eggshells
Business
Heard
Snare
Written
Intolerance
Spotlight
Puddles
Rebellious
Dignity
Portrait of a Lady
Cloth
Difficult
Mother
Complicated
Dreamcatcher
Chosen
Jacqueline in a Box
Spice
Validated
Ass–onists
Devour
Settled
