Bundling Up a Storm in the Skin of a Woman

Prose Poetry

Photo by Andrey Zvyagintsev on Unsplash

Oh, here you are — once again trying to tame a woman who you deem too wild to be left alone. You see the red dress, and something in you flares like a bull sighting a matador’s cape. You lunge forward because you cannot stop yourself from something — in this case a someone — that offers a challenge in your boring, humdrum life.

Why do you think you can tame her? Is it the way her eyes are velvet brown and wide as a doe’s as seen through a hunter’s scope? You do not wish for conversation — no, nothing as mundane as that — but you imagine how you might wrestle this woman into shape before she submits to you and you alone.

You have no idea of the storms that crackle and brew inside her. A lick of her lightning could ruin you for life. You think she’s a fire — but, no, she’s a force of nature that’s been let loose in this small space. Just watch the way she dances to that corner jukebox. Her hips sway as if they’re signaling a long-lost language too primal to be understood by modern minds.

You see the other men watch her too, and that makes you want her all the more. Competition always makes the hunt, as you deem it, all the more satisfying.

But as you walk towards her — lurching, looming, leering — she has no eyes for you. In truth, she has no eyes for…