Ladies of Horror Flash Project – #Horror #author Sheikha A. @Darc_Nina #LoH #fiction

The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Benazir
by Sheikha A.

to giving Venus a rainforest

It has begun raining nightmares –

red-striped lizard tails like sleet

slaking her glass dome of reality.

She stealths the days on acid feet;

her nights, cloudburst of molten lead.

She has /been/ warned: forfeit shadow/s

to the spirit of charity – emerald fruit

plantations on her mercurial being –

no one can touch her dark tresses:

canopy over secret lands she sows.

They say her death was mysterious;

she was excavated from a distance

of failure. Flakes of ice sparked fire

where she stepped. They harnessed

what they could not co-in/habit –

howls of her crying: falling rain –

re/constructing her seal: tombs

of grace. Motes of unbreathable air

lay low and heavy; emerald flashes

of noiseless thunder. Her wails pulse

in her veins. The night, black velvet.

The cosmos, panther in the wind.

for Marge Simon, Krysia Jopek and Saad Ali

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!