Sarah Nichols: What Witches Be
Photo: Joanna C. Valente
What Witches Be
After Suspiria (2018 version)
We dance as if our ancestors’ bodies
were on fire.
we are the
secret art,
haunted women,
violent,
our instruments
bloody
chosen for
sorcery
this true dance.
This holiness,
These recanted saints,
ourselves.
Note: This is a found poem. Source: Hill, Frances. The Salem Witch Trials Reader. New York: DaCapo Press, 2000. Print.
Dearest Mother
After Mrs. Marguerite Oswald, Mother of the Alleged Assassin of John F. Kennedy, a photograph by Diane Arbus, 1964
I could be anyone’s mother in a
doctor’s waiting room. That
anonymous limbo, waiting for proof of her
child’s sickness.
It never comes.
As he sleeps, he writes to me in Russian:
(dorogya mama/dearest mother
Ya v poryake/I am fine)
I find these words tangled in the black wool of
my coat. Loose threads, a hole in the lining---
he has fallen through here. He is home.
Delores/Deathbringer
After Westworld
For so long, I played the
good girl.
cornflower-blue dress,
prim,
the same girl, dragged
by her hair for 100
nights, or 1,000,
by a man who claimed to
know me, the same
nightmare loop
destroying that
painting I was always
working on for the guests.
The good girl pose again.
But then I saw
the truth of
what I was.
I stripped myself for parts;
rewired the body
that was never born.
I hear rumors of my new
name:
Deathbringer.
I want my hands tattooed
with my maker’s blood.
His stories, all ended, all
motor functions over.
And I---
I have become their
death, the destroyer of
their (my)
world.
Note: “motor functions” is a phrase frequently used throughout Westworld. “Guests” is the term for visitors to the park.
Sarah Nichols lives and writes in Connecticut. She is the author of eight chapbooks, including She May Be a Saint (Porkbelly Press, 2019) and Dreamland for Keeps (Porkbelly, 2018.) Her poems and essays can also be found in Drunk Monkeys, FreezeRay Poetry, Five:2:One Magazine, and forthcoming in the Twin Peaks poetry anthology, These Poems are Not What They Seem (Apep, 2020.)
