Member Poem

She dreads the scaly amours
of his infernal touch more
than his eternal indifference.
Each time he returns home

from his nefarious calling,
he calls her to their bed
and elaborates upon life
and skulduggery in the

world above, he complains
of Lucifer himself and
the partisan politics of
the netherworld, of how

he has been passed over
again, and then he raises
one huge and horny palm
against the flesh of her

side, and she starts to
quiver in what he mistakes
for passion, so he slowly
sates his own in rounds

and conjurings of perverse
imagination, her long nails
splintering on his glossy
impenetrable hide, cries

rising in the dank forest
where their mansion stands,
where the nocturnal trees
bloom on for centuries,

where their long departed
children, no longer demons,
no longer fiendish and sad,
are faces in the branches.

Appeared in Asimov's SF