Sara Tantlinger
wake up the blue feathers are full, whispering against your morning skin dragging beads and netting across the willow hoop’s frame where delicious nightmares remain hostage to the dreamcatcher’s spidery cradle open those eyes to your favorite dark thoughts watch them make love to remnants of soft images you tried to keep afloat within a sleep-cloud above your head but your nightmare-girl sighs, blue feathers bind her wrists together shadowed body pliable and caught between the spikes and plumages you’ve come to claim your punishment because terror has never whetted your appetite the way she does never traced its tongue so far inside your mind never wrapped long, stroking fingers around your spine so hard with that hot, nightmare blood dripping and staining the sheets open your lips to simmering bites against the curve of your throat swallow your nightmare-girl down keep her aching in your belly wake up splay your palms against webbing and beads where the blackest thoughts are caught, where you’d rather live between the warm thighs of illusionary darkness bound in terror, and make love in a bed of blue feathers
Sara Tantlinger is the author of Love For Slaughter, and her most recent publications appear in Abyss and Apex and in 100 Word Horrors: An Anthology of Horror Drabbles. She is a contributing editor for Oddville Press and an active HWA member. Find her lurking on Twitter, @SaraJane524.