Malleable (NaPoWriMo) Day 1

When our eyes first collided, of all the clichéd places, across the library aisles, there was no bang and clang, except my accelerated heartbeat! His bourbon ones fringed with thick inky lashes gazed at me from under bushy laughing brows, mine; nondescript muddy brown, were expectedly affronted. Not only because our fingers were clasped across the same book but because I thought he was laughing at me. But the intensity of his eyes was like a frission up my spine. I left the spine of the book. That’s when my gaze fell on his hands, I visibly gasped. Nut brown and muscular, they were in stark contrast to his fair skin.

“I am a blacksmith”, he said as if reading the questions in my eyes. I shrank back, not knowing how to respond.

When finally I was able to unstick my tongue from my palate, I croaked, ” But what are you doing in a library?”
His unrestrained laughter had the librarian scowling at us.

Our relationship was doomed before it could start. My prejudices got the better of me. But he wooed me relentlessly, leaving exquisite iron figurines at my doorstep on the first of every month.

After six months when the bell rang, I found him at the door, beaming and his hands behind his back. With a flourish he went down on his knee and presented me with a perfectly made cast-iron skillet! In awed silence, as I held it in my hand and felt its weight and admired the seamless craftsmanship, he quietly lifted the lid. Inside, nestled a beautiful handcrafted platinum ring!

The prompt for today is based on Robert Hass’s remarkable prose poem, “A Story About the Body.” The idea is to write your own prose poem that, whatever title you choose to give it, is a story about the body. The poem should contain an encounter between two people, some spoken language, and at least one crisp visual image.

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