Rambling Roads 🏵

I still have no patience for the male gaze that scans me like meat, stabbing me with its barbs to cling possessively.  The one that falls slick on the skin and slides down like oil.  The one that seeks to label and define, confining me to a thin outline of myself instead of  drawing me out of my pores, so I rise to meet it, expanding, connecting.  But still I yearn for the gaze that sends shivers, tingles and a quickened heartbeat racing through my body.  The one that sweetly caresses, the one shaped like a question mark.  Curious, exploring eyes, the spark, the centrifugal force puling me in deeper.  The one that when I meet it and our eyes lock, fire shoots through my veins creating a flaming bridge I ache to walk across.   And then there is your gaze.   The one that sugar coats my skin until it glows, that breathes air into me until I am plump and filled with affection.   Your fingers gingerly touch each vertebra, the curve of ...

Under the still waters of my eyes rages a war.  But you have to look closely to see it.  I’ve spent years perfecting the façade.  Smoke and mirrors.  An ancient dance passed down through my chromosomes.  Swirling scarves conceal my form with swashes of color and arching movement.  A dangerous flirting/wrangling with the male gaze that glares intrusively from blue flickering TV screens and screams out from larger than life billboards I speed past on the highway.  I’ve had to learn my place in the shadow of sketchy “gentlemen clubs” on the outskirts of town.  Cooking in my grandmother’s kitchen while the boys play football outside.  Scantily clad women cheering on the sidelines of Cowboys games on Sunday afternoons.  The humiliation of raised skirts on the playground or hanging exposed on the monkey bars.  Giving “sugar” on the wrinkled cheeks of East Texas friends of the family and told “not to be rude” if I shied away.  Legs...