Potential

By Amanda Quesada

Could I ever hope to be as arresting as she is?

Her physicality, her hyper-realism, is almost too much to look at.

Her water-peak shoulder blades slid up and down

like a pair of anticipating hands rubbing together.

Her shoulders were peaking and dipping,

dripping and running in rivulets roped with muscle.

Her hulking, haunch-dripping walk rolled like a wave

that made me sway in my seat from the ripples of her power.

She is the sort that says nothing and can intimate everything.

When she stands up in the evenings, the rest of the pride stands too.

Stiff from sleeping through the hottest part of the day, she stretches,

her strength beaming from her body in the setting sun.

Her claws protract against the ground in a languid show of potential.

She walks past our vehicle silently, except for her panting.

As she passes, she heaves one glance at me, 

and her eyes slice through the day like a sword on fire,

searing me across the face, the heat of it burning in my throat.

The stare of a lion has a hand at the end of it.

Hers reached into my body, and grabbed a hold of my stomach,

giving it a little squeeze, letting me know a fraction of her potential.

Her stare put just enough pressure on my diaphragm 

to make my heart hammer in my ears.

This happened in the split second her yellow-white eyes cut past mine,

and she continued on her way, leaving me with a racing heart,

cold hands, and a hot face.

 

Amanda Quesada is a traveler and poet who grew up under the scrub oaks of California’s Sierra Nevada foothills. Her first passions were drawing and building elaborate worlds in her imagination.