The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!
Power Outage
by Sheikha A.
Two crows come for her arms—
tides of sharks at her window
.
in a dream; an ocean snakes
its tongue through the fly mesh,
.
sash and architrave on verge
of bursting from their fixtures;
.
her room heavy under outage,
darkness rising from a pail
.
of musty air, and sleep arid
against dampened landscape.
.
Night hangs deep by its noose;
she has seen a headless woman
.
on a stark afternoon of a short
circuited hour few nights before.
.
Metal chains mewl across
polished mosaic in the quiet,
.
her breathing fills night’s chest—
the house always dark at day,
.
light fragmented— inside her
canyon, whimpering children
.
crowing the walls, stitching
threads of dust over frames.
.
They’ve been sending sharks
to her dreams; thrusts of ocean
.
ready to forage her room.
Sentinels twist her down.
.
Fleet of whispers flag her body
in ritual sheet— bones in belly —
.
darkness chews on the hours—
headless woman by the door,
.
low whimpers rise in her ears,
black feathers stroke her eyes—
.
It won’t be light soon; the outage
extended; two crows at her arms—
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.
Spreading the Writer's Word 
An excellent poem.