This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jordi Alonso, is from Hexenhaus by Sarah Nichols, released by Milk & Cake Press.
After My Mother’s Death, I Become a Witch
After Suspiria (2018)
I dance her body into the ground.
Rituals have their own
geographies: the women wash her even as she
murmurs that I am the stain she smeared on
the world. I am instead the initiate who hosts
all the mysteries that she prayed to keep me
from. I offer up our blood for the
promises, red wings, red rags, my costumes.
She rests on another shore:
her one body a pirouette of
fire
Sarah Nichols lives and writes in Connecticut. She is the author of ten chapbooks, including Press Play for Heartbreak, a memoir about music told in micro essays, forthcoming from Paper Nautilus Press this year. It was also one of the winners for that press’s Vella Chapbook prize last year. She writes frequently on the intersection of pop culture (or any culture, really), and memory, and is just as devoted to film as she is to words. Her work can be found in Everything in Aspic, Drunk Monkeys, Moonchild Magazine, and any of the nine chapbooks she’s had published over the years.
Jordi Alonso holds a BA from Kenyon College, an MFA from Stony Brook University, and a PhD in English from the University of Missouri where he studied nineteenth century British literature, classical reception in the Victorian era, and ancient Greek. He will begin his studies towards an MA in Classical Studies at Columbia University in the fall. His first book, a collection of erotic poems inspired by Sappho, Honeyvoiced, was published by XOXOX Press in November of 2014. His chapbook, The Lovers’ Phrasebook was published in 2017 by Red Flag Press. He is currently writing a third book of poems based on ancient Greek divination practices at Delphi.
