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The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Hexenhaus by Sarah Nichols

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

All the Floors Are Darkness

After Suspiria (2018)

The red network is
gutted.

Mother, I see you floating
above me,
shadow cast in deep
blood hunger,

A queen rotten with age,
night-bland, a mouth enormous.

I am becoming another name: devourer.
Dark house. I mother myself. Red tongue,
witch-doll, bitter spider, body.

Night’s
radiance sleeps in me: it burns, sighs

hooks bursting with old blood, a bride of glass.

Nothing burns. This is what it is to be complete.

Note: This poem is a cento, using the work of Sylvia Plath, with lines from “Pursuit,” “The Disquieting Muses,” “Ouija,” “Lorelei,” “Poem for a Birthday: Who,” “Poem for a Birthday: Maenad,” “Poem for a Birthday :Dark House,” “Poem for a Birthday: Witch Burning,” “Widow,” “Poppies in July,” “Berck-Plage,” “Elm,” and “Event.” All of these are found in Plath’s Collected Poems (New York: Harper and Row, 1981. Print.)

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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