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Overview
The Lioness Awakens is an illustrated work of short poems with a bite. Lauren Eden writes provocative poetry about love, sexuality, heartbreak, and feminism, combined in a creative expression of female empowerment and confidence...
I was always
suspicious of those
Happily Ever Afters
disappearing without a trace
with no other pages as evidence.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250208736 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/26/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 206 |
| File size: | 15 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
PREY
LIABILITY
I'm afraid I have attracted more moths than flowers with this light.
PARANOID
They tell me I'm being paranoid but I am convinced a woman gave me life and men have been trying to kill me ever since.
DEBT
They tell me I am beautiful
then stand there waiting as though it owes them something.
SPORT
When you look like a kill,
all Bambi legs and deer-in-the-headlights stare,
you look like you're game whether you are ready or not.
HEADS OR TAILS
I am like a coin they flip from my back to my stomach.
On one side I am love,
the other I am war.
PRESENT
It was like looking at the sea and being told it was green the way they wrapped up hate in pretty paper and called it love.
ARMOR
I look in the mirror armed with my soldiers of lipstick and mascara with only one mission in mind:
How to look less dead.
TEENAGE HEROES
I think back sometimes to those boys at school I let them put their hands up my skirt for a cheap thrill while I chewed gum and looked the other way like it was no big deal because I was dying at home and truth be told all those boys at school with a spare fifteen minutes to hold me, saved me.
QUICK FIXES
I pop men like pills to make me happy,
but they all wear off in the end.
LESS
You didn't owe me anything more because I took off my clothes for you,
but I need you to know that you didn't owe me any less either.
WITCH HUNT
Those same fingers that
stroked me tenderly in the
night, from my neck down to
the small of my back, are
pulling me apart this
morning. In a frantic witch
hunt through the dark
forest of my bones; firing
arrows into the soft, fleshy
meat of my heart, where he
wants to cut out all the men
that came before him; his
palm, open and waiting, is
demanding I spit out their
names like apple seeds.
Who were they? How many?
His hands wave at my chest,
searching for the guest
book.
Who came before you? I repeat,
taking one step forward,
unflinching, my eyes cold
and hard like bullets and
shoot him down. Love did.
DIFFERENT
You shift in your seat to get comfortable.
I shift in my skin.
Please don't tell me we are the same.
D.O.A
Men hurt me before I had the chance to love one.
BROKEN HOME
I spent hours on my knees as a child making dollhouses out of cardboard boxes gluing together scraps of cloth to make blankets to keep them warm and not once did I make one of my dolls cry or make one scared to fall asleep in her own bed —
don't tell me I was too young to know any different.
I was born with the meaning of home running through my veins.
DECONSTRUCT
You are not a child anymore.
You should know better than to pull a woman apart just to see how she works.
INVADED
I was peace and you brought war.
I'd never had a man call it love before.
COLLATERAL DAMAGE
Sometimes we are just the collateral damage in someone else's war against themselves.
ROAM
We are the ones who found more peace in the wild —
fugitive lionesses roaming without prides tough and beaten not scared of the streets not when we felt that much fear at home.
CRIMINALS
I couldn't tell you the names of everyone I've loved —
they are a blur of giddiness —
but I could pick out the face of every single person who's hurt me in a lineup.
EDITS
It wasn't until I could read my own fairytales that I knew my mother had been lying.
I know she'd edited out that big bad wolf.
MASOCHISM
Loving you became just a different way to hate myself.
CLARITY
You told me you would protect me always not understanding that mostly it would mean protecting me from you.
SWALLOW
I've been bitten too many times by the men with golden tongues hissing pretty words in my ear like snakes urging me to take a bite but I have lost my appetite for Adam's apple —
a throat bulging with tiny black seeds of cyanide like lies not even he can swallow.
ADRIFT
I lost myself in men like they were the ocean and I was adrift.
That is what happens when a siren loses her voice.
PRIZE
To live life through the flesh is to submit to the hunter.
MAGICIAN
For my final trick I show you my skin and watch you disappear by morning.
DARK CIRCLES
I like to keep my darkness close circling right under my eyes stalking my face just out of sight.
YOUNG
They're all looking for someone to grow old with and I am looking for the one who can make me feel like a child again.
DAMAGED
A man almost destroyed me so I chose the next one so hellbent on destroying himself he wouldn't have the strength to hurt me.
It was then I learned of collateral damage.
PUNCH-DRUNK
Love was you sitting in the armchair a bottle in one hand cigarette in the other and I on your lap wishing you would hold me.
BRUISES
He lives rough. His days are
not so gentle on me, like
splintered wood rubbing
against silk. It hurts. It
hurts to see the way he
drinks like a fish and still
drowns. Hands shaking in
his lap. Words like gentle
homicides. But when he
loves, he is delicate. You
should see the flowers
unfold like paper. They are
as in love with him as I
am-their love is written
all over their petals, and
mine on my face.
He kisses like the wind. His
hands, like birds in my
hair. He moves inside me
like a prayer; rolling over
afterwards like he's lost
faith the moment I get up to
open the window. He thinks
I'm going to fly away again,
but I'm just trying to
breathe. He's hard to
breathe in. He tastes like
cigarettes and death — a slow
suicide I can't look away
from.
And I leave with bruises.
Purple orbs from my arms
too tight across my chest
trying not to revolve my
whole world around him; my
flight pattern marked upon
my arms like track marks.
This is no joy ride, my
kamikaze pilot, my bomb;
always going off to war
with you.
SAFE
He'd always ask me if I felt safe with him so many times I began to question why he so badly needed to hear it.
TRAMPLED
O maiden moon how the men walked all over you just to prove that they could.
REVENGE
I prey on married men who remind me of my father with wives who look like the woman who took him away from me splitting them apart in carefully considered ways —
ways I was never considered.
WHITE KNIGHTS
My biggest fright was finding out that even the men who were good were not always good.
I'd been looking for the men with sharp teeth and narrowed eyes looking at me like a meal.
I didn't know that it was the men with hands gentler than my own with voice boxes filled with honey men who sharpened their knives on diamonds and fed me little white lies that tasted like sugar going down —
that these would be the men who would hurt me most.
TANGLED
I wonder of other women. How
they might untangle their
bodies softly from their
lovers' after they make
love, delicately, like
unknotting two necklaces
twisted together in a
jewelry box. Women who let
a man linger a little longer
inside them, like a hand
pausing mid-air in
farewell.
I wonder of women like me.
Women who rip their bodies
away quickly afterward,
like a band-aid covering a
wound he thought he could
kiss all better (the wound
that never gets better).
Women who snatch
themselves away angrily
like a child who doesn't
want to share herself
anymore. Women who roll out
of a man's arms as
naturally as other women
roll in; their eyes fixed
dreamily on his chest while
ours stare idly at the wall,
fixed, as the rest of us lies
broken.
WANT
Some days it hurts and I need to remember this on the days that it doesn't.
Remember to protect my thin skin on the days I wear mine thick like armor.
Remember that on the nights he feels like a vacation he will feel like an abandoned house in the morning.
Remember that on the days I am stuck in his honey I will wake in the morning eyes stinging from wanting him.
Remember that he only wants me some of the time when I've only ever wanted him always.
MUTUAL
I kissed a man's neck last night for the first time in as long as I can remember and I thought
finally
after all this time I am beginning to see sex as something I do and not something that is done to me.
TOGETHER
He came to me with his hands deep inside his pockets ashamed of the dirt hidden behind his fingernails and I held them in mine palm to palm and with the warmth we made he grew flowers.
FIX
There's a theory that says if you don't fix a broken window within a couple of days you will invite vandals and if people work in the same way then I've only got one more day to get over you.
CAPTIVITY
STARVED
When you are not fed love on a silver spoon you learn to lick it off knives.
FIRST
I feel his mouth closing in.
I lick my lips quickly to get to me first.
TOO CLOSE
It was your breath warm and beating on the back of my neck erupting my skin in a shiver that I now recognize as a reaction of fear —
you standing too close for me to breathe.
OPEN
I envy birds how their home has no ceiling how they never outgrow their lives never bump their heads never stoop never crouch never fold up smaller to fit through doors the world insists they walk through.
TINY
I cannot fathom how I could ever have shrunk so small to live in the palm of a hand.
CHASE
I'm afraid that he could have the warmest hands and I would still slip between his fingers.
The truth is I've been slipping since the day a man put his hands on me —
when I was too young and hadn't yet found the joy in keeping still and now love feels like just a wriggle-away
like a game of hide and seek like the cat and mouse pursuit of a girl who likes to be chased much more than she likes to be caught.
COLD
It was like standing in front of the moon like you would the sun and expecting it to warm you.
SPRAY PAINT
It is not love to graffiti yourself on men who are like brick walls,
to throw yourself like paint at their cold hard chests trying to make art,
to fingerprint on the walls of a house that will never feel like home.
That is not love.
That is vandalism.
TEARS
I think I'm crying for all the men who can't —
it seems the only way I can explain it how they can look at me with eyes as hollow and dry as empty cups while I pour
neither glasses half full nor empty.
MIGRATE
Like a migrating bird leaves when there is no fruit left on the tree I'll go where it's warm.
I won't stay to die with you.
CONDIMENTS
His rummaging through me is not gentle.
No matter how carefully he turns things over —
it is an invasion I say to force your way through doors I keep closed behind me wanting more always more looking for salt when I've put the sugar bowl in front of you.
HALF-CAF
He would order me at half-strength if he could.
Like a weaker coffee a customer custom-orders from the barista who shares an eye-roll with the man next in line who I wish were next in line for me.
STAINED
I can smell fear as well as
the next dog. I smelled it on
him like cheap cologne and
napalm. I told myself all
men smelled that way. I'd
smelled it on my father the
week before he left my
mother, leaving behind an
air of entitlement and
unpaid telephone bills.
It is the scent of the free
man. Wild grass, trickling
sweat and tobacco. It is the
scent of motor oil and gas
when he slams his foot on
the accelerator, leaving
puffs of smoke like empty
speech bubbles. It is the
scent of sex with girls who
look nothing like you,
lipstick-stained wine
glasses and fresh lingerie
off the line — a scent so
heavy you can't blow it out
of your nose for weeks. It
permeates. It stains. It
reeks, and I smelled it,
stronger, whenever I'd lean
in closer asking him never
to leave me. And I smelled it
strongest, that day in June
when I asked him if one day
he thought he might ever
want to marry me. I followed
it, its trail, circling the
front of his door as he left
me on my knees, begging
him, I can give you more
time. I can wait a little
longer.
And here I am, still on them,
scrubbing out the smell of
broken dreams from his
carpet.
SHARE
A pretty cover makes them hover like a man reading another man's newspaper over his shoulder.
And a man doesn't like to share his newspaper any more than he likes to share his woman so he closes her,
narrows her just wide enough for his eyes only until the men beside him lose interest and vow to find another.
FREE
It is the way I pull away from him when he kisses me my hair wound gently in his fist that tells me I will always fight for freedom in even the most beautiful capture.
TRUST
Watch how the sky keeps the stars in his sight without holding them.
CAPRICIOUS
I want you all to myself,
he says.
They all say it soon enough but I've never been a loyal girl —
I love in moon and not in star coming to them a little less a little more each night.
GOOD GIRL
You can sieve the stars from the sky and glue them together to make a moon and it may fool you for awhile —
Is a light not just a light?
But you will start to see the cracks like the veins you traced inside his arms from the right one you let go because your mother and your father and your god told you so and now your heart is a dark place it is a hopeless abyss where your heart sinks cleanly like a stone making no ripples like the good girl you are.
STICKY SITUATIONS
Beautiful women are like bees stuck in their very own honey.
STRANGE
Is it strange to have men look at you all day?
he asked.
No. But it would be strange of me to notice.
NAKED
I outgrew romantic love long
ago. Like a favorite sweater
I kept putting back on
because I remembered once
when it kept me warm. When
I once felt good in it.
Before it became riddled
with holes like a badly told
lie. Before it felt heavy on
my shoulders, like the world
was putting pressure on me
to get it right.
I had to say, enough, enough. I
can't breathe. I can't move.
I can't pretend any longer
that this is what I want.
I want to be bare. Bold.
Truth-telling. Absolute,
without the filling in of
another. I want to be like
the wind, naked and free,
running through the gaps of
fingers, blowing up skirts,
ruffling the ends of hair,
without ever getting caught.
THE PRINCESS AND THE PEA
I crave the fire the one that blazes in a man's eyes when I take off my dress and let him do the rest.
I crave deadly reds and tangerine dreams hungry hands down the front of my jeans and I don't know what transpires in my mind —
this desire of the weakest kind to be needed from the outside in my heart — a pea beneath these distracting layers of flesh that men lie upon in the night as I lie awake hoping by morning they'll feel it.
Q&A
We curve like a question mark to fit the shape of a lover's body that when alone,
lie simple and straight like an answer.
NOTICE
It is easy to call a woman waving her hands around
hysterical
when a man loves with his hands over his ears.
That is the language of a woman gone unheard too long.
FLIPSIDE
I had two sides to me but I could only see one.
That is what happens when you only hear your mother's side of your story.
PARADOX
He is the only one I could give up my power to because he is the only one who has never asked.
CIRCLES
Men broke me. And now I love
broken men. A sick, full
circle that makes me dizzy
and gets me nowhere. Men
who have moments of loving
me so purely they surprise
themselves like a hiccup.
It's that surprise. I'm
addicted to that surprise.
As though they never knew
they had it in them, and
here I am pulling love out
of their mouths like ribbon.
I am a magician. Look at
what's inside you. Look at
all this magic.
I want to call their mothers.
Their fathers. Tell them,
Look at what your boy is
capable of. Look what you
could've grown in him had
you watered him every day
with the same devotion with
which you poured liquor
down your throats. (No, you
never forgot to do that.)
And here he is. This man.
Rising each morning for me
like a sun. Tucking my hair
behind my ear. Writing me
poetry.
But when it falls apart, it
falls apart good. Like a
hurricane of misery
sweeping through me — my
life in ruins. This man
knows how to hurt, and when
I hurt him, I look like every
goddamned person who let
him down, unrecognizable
in his lineup, like a mural
of pain with faces all
blurred into one. And that
is when the darkness comes.
Deeper and darker — a
fiercer devil than I'd ever
encountered in those angel
boys I loved.
But it's always worth it,
somehow. My hand on the
side of his face reminding
him, It's me. It's me. It's not
them, it's me. Come back to
me. And there it is. Those
two lights turn on in his
eyes like flashlights in a
derelict house. And it's time
for me to plant flowers
again.
LIGHT
The less you require of love the lighter love gets.
I once told a man he didn't need to build a life with me.
I didn't need him to be husband material;
pay my mortgage mow my lawn —
he just needed to be the love of my life
and you should've seen his whole body sigh rising like smoke from dead wood in the fire.
LOST
I lose one I lose them all these domino men falling all over again flat on their backs like bugs the wrong side up like a coin that never brings me luck — fuck
I lose one I lose them all.
HOVER
I will not let a man hover over me like a coat he insists I cover up with.
I've always thought I was best dressed with bedroom eyes with a strut that could outrun freedom.
COMMIT
Some moths fly to lanterns while some fly straight to the fire.
But is it really a life if we are not killed by the very thing we desire?
SHARED
You are not meant to be kept close to a man's chest like a secret.
You are meant to be shared until the world is whispering of you.
ADVICE
The wind caresses my arms like a familiar lover.
My skin aquiver at her confessions as she whispers in my ear everything I need to know about letting go.
SHARPENING THE CLAWS
TASTE
I am not bitter nor am I sweet —
I am water and how I taste to you depends on what you mix me with.
NATURAL
I'm tired of getting pretty for you.
The ocean doesn't color herself blue.
REFLECTIONS
Men are lousy mirrors.
Rather than reflecting my innermost workings my fears my daddy issues I stop instead to fix my hair.
FED
Men think I'm not interested because I'm not dying of hunger for them but they've got me wrong I am hungry I just keep myself well-fed these days.
Excerpted from "The Lioness Awakens"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Lauren Eden.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Epigraph,
PREY,
Liability,
Paranoid,
Debt,
Sport,
Heads or Tails,
Present,
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,
NINE LIVES,
Shadow,
Ghost,
Lanterns,
Terminal,
Mistress,
Breathe,
Perspective,
Numb,
Everything,
Paraphrases,
Nurse on Call,
Soft Spots,
Hexagons,
Running,
Deaf,
Worn,
The Youngest Tired People,
Boulder,
Tidy,
Canyon,
No Casualties,
Water,
Origin,
Kindness,
Endings,
Apocalypse,
Evolution,
The Kindest Thing,
Confessions,
Surrender,
Belief,
Alone,
The Middle,
Peace,
Portal,
Survival,
Hope,
Simple,
Yin and Yang,
Softness,
Friction,
Awakening,
Returning,
Ritual,
Strip,
Paradise,
PRIDE,
Mine,
Higher Purpose,
Consent,
Worthy,
Biology,
Occupied,
Totality,
Progress,
Grace,
Mercy,
Immortal,
Gold,
Lessons,
Cold,
Revival,
Honest,
Impossible,
Revolution,
Kingdom,
Wild,
Raw,
Sexual Healing,
Sunset,
Friendship,
Ready,
About the Author,
Copyright,