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.)