How I Want to be Wanted
             After Henri Rousseau, The Dream (1910)

by Laura Ann Reed

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.

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"How I Want to be Wanted" was originally published in Ekphrastic Review.

Laura Ann Reed received a dual BA in French/Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, and subsequently completed Master’s Degree Programs in the Performing Arts and Psychology. She was a dancer in the San Francisco Bay Area prior to assuming the role of 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 or is forthcoming in MacQueen’s Quinterly, The Ekphrastic Review, and Willawaw, among other journals.