Poetry by Sarah Nichols

Are You Pregnant ?

The old woman who lived on the first floor of my building
and who loved Rick Santorum and Taylor Swift
asks me this question in the summer of 2012.

She claimed to be almost blind, but the good eye saw
my swollen body, an

opiate-fattened

tick.

Maybe it was true.

Maybe there was a monster-miracle
turning in its sleep
inside of me.

I went home to escape her
eyes, propping

my outsized ankles

on a chair, licking my skin for
trails of salt and sugar.

I take another pill for luck, the
wish of a

good birth.



​

Skyfall

How did the bottom start ?

Misguided kill shots in small white pills, the last
one or
second to last slicked down with

movie theater Coke. Not even James Bond
can stop

their disappearance. He takes two or three
and watches a scorpion crawl up his arm like I

watch my wall
waiting for the nod. One night

Bond goes to Shanghai. He swims
in neon jellyfish, a blinking undulation. He

must see the neon in my head. Not
a city. Not yet. Only a word that

hums, sick green. Take

all of that tiny white and
spin it to dust. There’s no

waiting there.

I take my cue from Bond---
he waits in the dark,
burns his house down.

I go back to my apartment. A
house full of white scorpions and neon.

I burn it down.





This is Not a Redemption Story, Part One

It’s Always Someone Else

It’s always someone else in those pictures.
Some baby’s parents miscalculated the dose

and there they are, dead or half dead,
new pariahs for a comment section.

No one wants to believe
they’ll be the one on hands and knees

grasping for the last pill that rolled under the
couch.

At least that’s where it might have gone. With none
there’s the shakes and the sickness and

death calls you a coward. You’d rather
take your time.

It’s always someone else who lies to a doctor. You
don’t look like a junkie; you clean up well. A thirty
day supply will last you ten if you don’t get

greedy.





This is Not a Redemption Story, Part Two
After Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is the Thing With Feathers----“

Somewhere inside me, hope is
shedding its feathers. Talons

extend and retract, gathering

small pieces of plastic and used
coffee cups for a nest; old

lamentations

that I barely remember. My voice

blows on a coal to keep it

alive.

​

Bio: Sarah Nichols lives and writes in Connecticut. She is the author of five chapbooks, including Dreamland
for Keeps (Porkbelly Press, forthcoming, 2018) and How Darkness Enters a Body (Porkbelly Press, forthcoming, 2018). Her work is also forthcoming and has appeared in Glass, Rogue Agent, Rag Queen Periodical, and LunaLuna.

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