The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Hexenhaus by Sarah Nichols


This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jordi Alonso, is from Hexenhaus by Sarah Nichols, released by Milk & Cake Press.

Madame Blanc

After Suspiria (2018)

Susie

I will make her my mother. The one
I would bleed for.

She dances out our shared history:
no ordinary birth.

Our skin beaten anemic white,
our skin beaten Klimt gold

the mother of darkness, me,
destroying her

the death dance she offered.

II. Mme. Blanc

I send her my dreams like
entrails
to read.

She empties herself,

readying, readying. The dance is

the least of this: close your eyes, girl.

I send you stigmata, bleeding feet, marks to
reverse

holiness. We rise together:
mother, daughter.


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.

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