How I Want to Be Wanted, by Laura Ann Reed

The Dream, by Henri Rousseau (France) 1910

How I Want to Be Wanted

That man who painted me nude in his Paris studio 
and later seduced me on a velvet divan--
he was no kind of match for his lions and snakes.
I missed being ravished by wildness. 
In the end, I dreamed myself back 
to the rain forest, to those tropical snakes 
so inflamed by my beauty they had to be soothed 
by a flute player while they writhed into shapes 
that mimicked my hips, my breasts and my thighs. 
That’s how I want to be wanted--
with the type of desire the lions had for my throat.

Laura Ann Reed

Laura Ann Reed, a native of Berkeley, California, was a dancer in the San Francisco Bay Area prior to becoming the Leadership Development Trainer at the San Francisco headquarters of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. She and her husband now reside in Western Washington. Her work has been anthologized in How To Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, and has appeared in Blue Unicorn, Grey Sparrow, The Ekphrastic Review, Verse Virtual and other journals.