light sleeper, heavy dreamer

the journal of hope leone

[susurratim]

I don’t set out to write about myself. I'm always wanting to talk about something else, someone else, am I not interesting enough, have I not hurt enough, is it fair to ask myself if I'm enough for art? If it sounds shallow, that's how it feels. I hate that I feel compelled to tell you I love your hands, your face feels so soft, the side of your neck smells just how it should. If I could just stop talking, if it could matter less. I took one art class. I couldn't draw a library to scale because I couldn't get the lines to go straight up, the way that buildings are built against the earth, brick spines and glass lungs, sucking in air and pushing it out, the muscles your hands on the window latch. A big puppet full of books, not even trying to mock me. I'd drop the posture I tried so hard to correct to hide the page, hunched over and he'd see it anyway, the professor, you're not doing poorly, just move that over--I drew half a roof and never finished, too terrified that I might not get it right. I just wanted another way, a parachute. If I have to throw myself out of the plane I want to know I'm going prepared. I can dance. Sometimes I like that better. If someone had bought me a lesson, a leotard, why a diary? You can watch someone stumble. If you fall over, you stand up. How do I stand up?

[susurratim]

13/08/2013

Dear lover,

I want to ask you, Do you think we'll always feel like this? and I don't mean in love, I don't mean like you want to lay me out on a park bench in the middle of the afternoon, ride me through one more screaming orgasm. I mean like yesterday I dropped a pencil for the hundredth time, and I couldn't pick it up. I mean like I have nightmares about dying that wake me up gasping, not because I'm scared of being dead. I tell you, The feeling you get when the roller coaster falls is the knotted fingers of your intestines dropping open, the flower of your fear crumbling into dust. Our bed is a lost and found. I want to tell you, I've got lungs that ache like endless applause. I want to tell you, I'm tired of catching my breath.

[susurratim]

09/08/2013

Two types

of intimacy:

your arms soft on mine, sweat luminescent across the heat of your throat. hold still and everything goes quieter through eyelashes. i sleep loose.

the split of your head a watermelon in june, lush as dirt churned by rain. in your hair on the pillow blood and my fingers. i tie you shut, one strand at a time.

[susurratim]

30/04/2013

The thing about wanting

You dream of slow kisses, dancing, but the boys walking slow motion through your head fall asleep and want nothing  but quiet. People are like that: constantly forgetting that their hearts are small things. No desire is universal. Your mother sits on the living room carpet, her hands full of photographs. "You were such a hopeful child," she says, and what happened? Once, you held scissors and cut down, hard, on your own finger. Blood and screams, glass shattering in the kitchen, your brother falling endlessly out of his high chair, soft skull on the tile and a driveway full of sirens. It was the fault of your father, who gave you his last Christmas present in the middle of May. You said, "Thank you," but kept having nightmares about your friends turning hateful, because that's the thing about wanting. You write the same words into every diary:  I dream all of the time about you loving me back.

[susurratim]

29/04/2013

Open

I tell you simple things: your hands are beautiful, and I hate it when you cut your hair too short, and when you first made cake just for me I wanted to cry. You say it scares you, how much I'm willing to say. I watch you eat an apple the size of my fist and kiss you later with envy, thinking of my fingers against your teeth. My body is honest as it can be: a coat I can't take off to wash clean. The bloodstains on the buttons are things you don't want to talk about. You want truth. For your twenty third birthday I buy you a caged bird carved of ivory. It's a question. Your smile doesn't touch your eyes. Do you think about the reason I kiss your neck like a wild thing? The way I dig my fingers into your skin? Your ribs are the width of cabinet handles.  You start calling me little bird and avoid my hands in the kitchen, like you're scared of just how hard I'm willing to tug.

[susurratim]

20/04/2013

No one really wins

It was an awards ceremony for all of the other things: Coldest Hands, Brightest Laugh, Most Likely to Leave the Milk Out on the Counter. It was Saturday and I was dreaming. My award was heavy, a big golden plaque, but I never got to read it. Between one coffee shop and the next I must have set it down. Maybe on the counter in the Starbucks lounge taken straight out of Atlanta, where you were sitting on a couch beside a math genius from sixth grade. I knew her name because I'd dreamed her eyes just right, blue like innocence: I'm good at remembering the smaller things. Next to her was your hair, too short, and my hands digging through the remainder. I was an archaeologist. Maybe if I searched long enough I'd unearth the bones of what came before: The way I'd guide you around by the ends, ruffle it up with both hands when I needed to show you what the change you made would look like, if love were a hairbrush. I said, "You've cut it off." You looked me right in the face.  "Yes," you said, "I did." I left right after and I remember thinking,  clear as a shot of caffeine clean as a perfect mountain of whipped cream ifyouwereacoffeeorderI'dgetyoueverytime: If they gave you an award,  it'd be for knowing how to make me want to forget.

[susurratim]

18/04/2013

Still

In the kitchen of my childhood home, my mother stops to take my hand. I have cold fingers, she says, and I tell her that a butterfly's internal temperature can never drop below eighty-six degrees or it will be forced to stop flying. She lets go. We chop the onions with our eyes cast down.

[susurratim]

03/02/2013

Extinguished

In your head I am a fire. You take me out on holidays, cup my heat between your hands. Watch me follow a wick down a well of melted wax. Think of romance and ruined fingernails, the way I always held the match too long. Was that the last straw, were you afraid? I hope I'm a question on a date with your new girl: "What happened to your--?" The answer is ashes, the answer is anything burning will eventually get too hot to hold. I am every scorch mark on your skin, every burnt inch of your kitchen table. I am the bonfire in your backyard on New Years Eve, your Christmas tree eaten alive: Black bones and the ornament you didn't see until it was too late.

[susurratim]

18/03/2013

Wanting

I will admit to feelings of jealousy. The cherries you ate this morning, their skin breaking beneath your teeth: I envied them their ripeness, the way that you devoured them. Later, when I have pulled a splinter from your hand, I will lay the wood sliver over my tongue: hungry for the taste of you, vulnerable. I will admit to wanting more of you than I can have.

[susurratim]

15/03/2013

Rapunzel's Independence

I grow my hair out longer and longer. To the floor a rolling golden wave

to crash at my feet in a soft froth. I want to feel a tug at my scalp

after every wrong step: A reminder that I am capable of leading

myself astray. You do not need to help me get lost. My braid is not a ladder

and my heart is not a room. Do not climb up. I have spent all of my loneliness

sweeping myself clean. In the end, every fingerprint they dust for

will be my own.

[susurratim]

11/03/2013

Force

We're at the fair again. Three years since our first date, you with sticky lips and me with eyes like ring toss bottles. How it feels to sit beside you now, gritty seat, fingernails digging into hands, like I'm falling already. Shallow gasp and we're flying up, you whispering, "It won't be that bad," and I remember, if you don't. Three years before, you said, "It isn't going to hurt," but I've learned since: The way I catch my breath makes my lungs burn  every time.

[susurratim]

04/03/2013

Proof

In a dream last night I ate your heart like an orange.  Each section was sweeter than the last.

It was the wish of the flowers you'd given me on Friday, and of the vegetables sat snug in the crisper, picked by your own hands.

I stood at the island and offered my small fruit to their brightness, their colors like curiosity:

Beautiful things grow in more places than the earth.

[susurratim]

25/02/2013

In defense of

You are angry with love. The word, the way people say it like children jumbling the letter magnets on the refrigerator, the door warm and hiding so much cold, the letters so bright, like church windows. You are angry with the way it stands still on the surface of a pond that beneath the lilies and the floating, discarded cigarette butts, teems with life. You say you have been conned. I tell you, over and over, on one half of our bed, my hands clenched tight into fists. Love is a strong thing if after being used so often, and wrongly, if after hanging hard from the rope of promise, sure as death or else uncertain as the strength of a human hand, it should stand up again, walk the tightrope, turn from water to wine and back again. If one word could have stood for so much, how should it prove that lightness, vulnerability, texture like a last gasp of air make it no less worthy of your lover’s tongue?

[susurratim]

30/01/2013

Letter to a girl with a heart like a coffee cup

You are eleven. He is everywhere you are. Do not get used to it. When he has to leave, you will say goodbye. Do not wish, later, that he had stayed. Do not ever kiss him. When he comes back, do not wrap him around you. Wear your certainty as a skin. Hang the sweater of him up in your closet. Ignore it, even during winter. His heat is the burning kind, and you are a paper girl.

You are fourteen. She will walk away and not look back. Do not expect her to. Your expectation is a yolk too heavy: it will drag you down. Do not carry your guilt like a gift you want to give her. You are guilty of nothing but being who you are, and she loved you. She loves you. Tell yourself, over and over, that it is not your fault. It is not your fault. She loves you. She was always going to leave you.

You are fifteen. Do not feel ashamed when you disagree with a thing he says. Do not hold out hope. Do not let yourself feel cold where he touches you. Remember his mouth tasting like soda, remember the way he whispered I really like you. Do not regret writing him that letter. Later, you will regret not loving him better. This you are allowed.

You are sixteen. You will never let yourself forget that she is impossible. Do not think of her legs in the television light and the way she tilts her head back when she laughs. Do not let your mind wander. It will only ever make you sad. Tell her that the poem is about her. Do not fool yourself. She will not understand.

You are seventeen, and it is only the beginning. Hold her close to yourself. Avoid thinking of the way every poem is about her. Ignore anything in you that threatens the way she rolls her eyes, the way she smiles at you, the way she asks after your family. You will not ever ask for more. Prepare yourself to need her. You are allowed to need. There are no warnings, here. She has a way of upending every plan.

You are eighteen. When he tells you to go back to sleep, listen. You are not dreaming. However much it hurts to admit, he is right. You will remember everything hazily. You will never know how you ended up with him on that couch, no matter how long you stay awake. It is not okay. You are still drunk. You are still raw as an open wound. Go back to sleep. It will hurt less, later, for your eyes to have been shut. He will be the only one you want to forget.

You are nineteen. He sits in you like a bag of sand. Scoop him out, slowly, with your own aching hands. Do not build a castle for him. Do not make your heart into a shrine. That love is too dangerous a religion. Cultivate a love for yourself strong enough to stand up to his. Do not ask the earth for his scent. Do not look for his face in photographs. Let him go. When you see yourself in the mirror, know that you did the best you could. Selfishness and humanity are not the same, and if the are, you cannot help it. Forgive your heart for straying. Welcome it back.

[susurratim]

29/01/2013

1.

you wouldn't think it was so strange for me to sit still beside you if you knew: you smell like the last thing i loved more than myself.

2.

if i were bolder, i would walk into your backyard and dig deep enough to find the strength to lift the words "the only thing" up out of the cedar chest of my heart and into my mouth.

3.

i keep all of my pictures of you in that box, desperate not to have them gather dust, or be visited by moths who only want to feel you, yet can't help but swallow things whole.

4.

you wanted to love the girl who wouldn't stop writing, even after you told her you didn't know how to write back. and her love like a fountain pen: words flowing out, nothing flowing in.

5.

i have wanted you to know: there is someone waiting who will know how to wash stains out. learn to write me when you've found her.

[susurratim]

28/01/2013

i eat carrot after carrot,  covered in peanut butter. you called it strange. no one eats that;  no one could really like  the way that tastes. the sweetness and so much bitterness, the strange snapping off of raw vegetable. grinding everything down slowly between my teeth. no one could really live like that. with everything contrasting, arguments like breaking things in half. at the bottom of the bag, too much dampness has collected. carrots rotted into wetness that coats my fingers, sour as the last words from your mouth.

[susurratim]

27/01/2013

disappointing that in this, you should still be a man and i should become a wife.

i set my ring beside the sink each time i wash my hands, and try with all my heart-- or is it my body, or is it

the lunch i pack for you, sealed tight in tupperware not to spoil, to be as you like it--

not to hope that it should fall into the drain, sink somewhere you'd have to reach deep

to get it free. i bury every secret inside of myself. in the supermarket, each smile comes after a look at my hands. i argue endlessly

with the credit card company, open mail addressed with your name. i bury every bitter seed of resentment, sink my teeth

into the flesh of a peach pulled from the fruit basket. remember with every scrape

of my incisors against the pit: before you, i was myself and into my self i can grow again.