Leonor
by Rhiannon M. Hart
Before my childhood dog that never liked you
died, we picked a future maybe
baby name, as unusual as mine,
as Portuguese as yours: Leonor.
Willful and elegant, she’d bleed
all the dangerous magnetism
of the violet thunderstorms our coasts share
from just one of her pink scraped knees.
Across a constellation, somewhere
downwind of a wormhole,
do you think we’re driving Leonor
home from her ballet class?
On the nights I writhe alone, sick and weary,
is the heat I feel on my cheek
the steam from our stove, warming soup
in our kitchen, a skip of a lifetime over?
If I were your wife,
our sink would never be clean,
our shower would never be dry,
and I would never get a good night’s rest. So I’d say,
No, I don’t want to hold your hand—
bitter, New England winters would
torment my skin, create jackknifed lines
that ached when they touched you.
I still would have run away from you,
eventually. Not so soon, maybe. I’d make the attempt
to be as selfless as the melting spring snow,
let the years split apart like broken pins on our clothesline,
until one day, the soup would blister the pot.
The car would go missing. The cat, too.
The interstate would lie
ahead of you, a trail waiting to be traced.
Soon, you’d find someone who called you “baby,”
who’d scrunch her nose in the mirror back at you
as you brushed your teeth, side by side. But first,
you’d teach Leonor your lovesickness—to
look for me in grocery store parking
lots, to look for your former wife,
counting each tomorrow
and tomorrow.
You don’t believe me, but this is for the better,
I swear. You hate me less here. I called Leonor’s
poor mother on a payphone once,
during a lightning strike, and she told me.