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.

I pirouette with her body,
my own fire

to the other shore.

Sarah Nichols lives and writes in Connecticut. She is the author of eight chapbooks, including She May Be a Saint (Porkbelly Press, 2019) and This is Not a Redemption Story (Dancing Girl Press, 2018.) Her poems and essays have been published and are forthcoming in Drunk Monkeys, Five:2:One Magazine, and the Twin Peaks poetry anthology, These Poems are Not What They Seem (Apep Publications, 2020).