The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

bone-food
by Sheikha A.

she watched her rice fields turn
into desiccated tillers and roots;

her lover is an alchemist
that mates with bones

growing hairs out of nails,
tying knots of everlasting

bondage. the sky is never
clean of jaundice-fever

and fire-flies flick between
teeth of skulls; in her dream

she crushed grains of rice
with bare feet and watched

hills open like snouts
sucking her harvest dry.

her lover is a tree of dead
teeth; last night she tried

to conjure him; words arranged
into lines, yet all she managed

was a burst of fugue. his strength
grows as he eats, bones turning

scarce. the moon churns amber
as she sleeps; the night cackles

as her legs are parted;
fist-sized foetus enters

her body – the spell in motion –
her lover is an eater of bones.

Fiction © Copyright Sheikha A.
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

More from author Sheikha A.:

Nyctophiliac Confessions:
Poems by Sheikha A. and Suvojit Banerjee

“The night is cold enough to inspire poetry,” says Sheikha A. in her poem, “Reading My Bones.” This is the basis of Nyctophiliac Confessions – poems that are introspective and luminal, poems that require a certain amount of silence and space to be fully formed and appreciated. Reading these poems, I imagined that they were the kind of poems that assert themselves unbidden during a bout of insomnia. (A nyctophiliac being someone who loves the night or loves darkness).

Nyctophiliac Confessions is the 17th installment of Praxis’ chapbook series and contains twenty-six poems written by two poets, Sheikha A. and Suvojit Banerjee, interspersed with abstract paintings by Robert Rhodes.

Available Here!