The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Dragoness
by Sheikha A. 

Over a metal bowl of milk, she burns

a piece of scripture on his name –

.

an iceberg in an ocean keels upwards,

blue-diamond underside, violet spinel

.

studs the curve of waves. She hums

his name into a candle’s melting wick,

.

her eyes glassy cyan mirroring his writhes

as the ocean throbs his ice-trapped form

.

into being. Ripe seeds of a pomegranate

cluster to shape a heart in the milk bowl,

.

embers of the burnt scripture fork

like a gush of veins through his skin.

.

His scales sprout like a grieving wail

of metallic sharpness, fangs and tail

.

molten. His eyes open to the urge of her

verses – white cataracts enveloping ice –

.

ocean in shivers as his nape pries out

of the clutch of an age-long sorcery.

.

She has pined these lands since ancient

times; his topography slave to her survival.

.

Splinters of ice stab the ocean’s surface

as her now unshackled beast emerges,

.

silver medallion like an ever watchful eye

glazing his chest. She drinks from the bowl

.

and swallows the seeds. He has died over

centuries brought to life by her relentless

.

craft – power of his eye guarding secrets

of the past – future laced on the magma

.

of his tongue; what he dies for without

revealing. It is eternal winter where she is –

.

where he encaged her in human form.

She will get him to rage fire, storm winds

.

in her direction. He expands his wings

to manoeuvre; the ocean shrivels under

.

his breath. Silver tinsel in her hair glows –

drenched in claim – this time he will not

.

escape. Her reach on the medallion is close.

Soon, she will be her true self: Dragoness.

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!