A Collection of Nightmares

By Christina Sng

Hold your screams and enter a world of seasonal creatures, dreams of bones, and confessions modeled from open eyes and endless insomnia. Christina Sng’s A Collection of Nightmares is a poetic feast of sleeplessness and shadows, an exquisite exhibition of fear and things better left unsaid. Here are ramblings at the end of the world and a path that leads to a thousand paper cuts at the hands of a skin carver. There are crawlspace whispers, and fresh sheets gently washed with sacrifice and poison, and if you’re careful in this ghost month, these poems will call upon the succubus to tend to your flesh wounds and scars.
    These nightmares are sweeping fantasies that electrocute the senses as much as they dull the ache of loneliness by showing you what’s hiding under your bed, in the back of your closet, and inside your head. Sng’s poems dissect and flower, her autopsies are delicate blooms dressed with blood and syntax. Her words are charcoal and cotton, safe yet dressed in an executioner’s garb.
    Dream carefully.
    You’ve already made your bed.
    The nightmares you have now will not be kind.
    And you have no one to blame but yourself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Raw Dog Screaming Press
• Release date: Jul 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9781935738985

Christina Sng

Christina Sng is the author of three collections of poetry: The Darkside of Eden (Allegra Press, 2002), Angelflesh (Sam’s Dot Publishing, 2002), and Dark Dreams (Naked Snake Press, 2006). Her work has received several Honourable Mentions in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror as well as a Rhysling Nomination. Since Y2K, her poems have sold to numerous North American, British, and Australian publications including Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Aoife’s Kiss, Bare Bone, Black Petals, Blood Rose, Cemetery Poets, ChiZine, Dark Animus, Dreams and Nightmares, Dust Devil, Electric Velocipede, EOTU, The Fifth Di..., Flesh & Blood, Hadrosaur Tales, The Journal, Lunatic Chameleon, The Martian Wave, Mythic Delirium, The Pedestal Magazine, Penumbric, Poe Little Thing, Scared Naked Magazine, Space & Time, Star*Line, Story House, Tales of the Talisman, The Whirligig, Wicked Hollow, and Yellow Bat Review, among many others. She was Featured Poet in The Edge: Tales of Suspense and Black Petals, and Twilight Tales’ International Author of the Month. In late 2001, she was commissioned by award-winning artist Frank Wu to pen several poems for his work. Some of her collaborators in fiction and poetry include British novelist Mike Philbin, and American poet and journalist Mike Allen. In 2002, 2003, and 2004, her poems The Marvel of Flight and Crimes of Our Youth, published in Wicked Hollow #1 and #4, The Bone Carver, published in ChiZine, The Art of Weaving, published in Flesh & Blood #14, and Asunder (with Mike Allen), published in Star*Line, received Honourable Mentions in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th Annual Editions, respectively. In 2007, her poem Medusa in LA, originally published in Tales of the Talisman, was nominated for a 2006 Rhysling Poetry Award (short poem category).

Book preview

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Also by Christina Sng

Astropoetry

An Assortment of Sky Things

Catku

A Constellation of Songs

Dark Dreams

The Darkside of Eden

Table of Contents

Also by Christina Sng

This book is dedicated to my children, my Lightbringers.

Exquisite

The Art of Weaving

The Bone Carver

The Path

Mirror to the Other Side

Resurrection Dreams

They Do Not Sleep

Crawlspace

That Evening

Confession

Cocoon

The Marvel of Flight

Dreams of Bone

The Skin Carver

Bottled Quiescence

Snow Tomb

Bruises

Death of a Thousand Paper Cuts

Inside

Visitation by Lady Death

Succubus

A Mosquito's Tale

The Atomizer and the Matchbox

The Confluence

Full Moon in Yellowstone

Sleep Takes a Vacation

Crimes of Our Youth

Ghost Month

The Fall

Ravenous

D-Day

Postwar

The Journey

Ramblings at the End of the World

Children in the Apocalypse

After the War

Daufin

The Awakening

Underwater

The Flood

The Dissection

The Monolith

Twenty Years

The World's Edge

Flectere si nequeo superos, acheronta movebo.

If I cannot bend the will of Heaven, I shall move Hell.

—Virgil’s Aeneid

This book is dedicated to my children, my Lightbringers.

Exquisite

You’re exquisite.

Stony-white and frozen,

Parched lips curled

In a delicate snarl—

Medusa caught you

Unexpectedly

That day in her town.

Like the snow queen,

You stand tall, beautiful,

A lone figure, still,

In the rage of winter’s furor.

Corpuscles flash frozen, all

But oblivious to time’s spiral.

Ten millennia later,

You stand proud

In the heart of my garden,

Immune to hail and rain,

The hatred in your eyes

Wilts the flora in your plane.

Yes, you’d inherited that

From her gaze.

Very formidable,

I must admit.

And today,

I offer a gift.

See my enemies before you

Silent on the ground,

A nail in each crown.

Beneath you,

They blacken and shrivel,

Fading into the ground.

Gorelets ooze,

Swirling beneath your feet,

A pink milky pool, seeping

Into your stony