Poetry: Sundays by Megan Nichols
Some poems wade in with the tide, some pour down your scalp like oil—”Sundays” throws fistfuls of paint, covers you in heated stones. Megan Nichols has made every square inch of language a lever and a weight, a clockwork machine built to deliver its own, and yours, demise.
Sundays
Weeks worth of egg shell, orange peel goes out
over the rose-swallowed fence. Ritual born
of waste. Water the inside life, punch worn
cushions, strip daybeds fresh, toothbrush the grout,
chop seven salads, get dressed. Attempt town,
feel unsafe. Come home, call about hawthorn
trees dying in the backyard. Feel all torn
up about having them cut down. Surround
yourself with salt and scented smoke. Talk back
to me for once. Stare down sunken eyes
in the mirror. The world will work its way
into your home, you know. It will slip back,
covert and casual as a fruit fly.
There’s not order enough to make you safe.
Megan Nichols
Megan Nichols is the author of the forthcoming chapbook Animal Unfit (Belle Point Press, 2023). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Iron Horse Literary Review, The Threepenny Review, Louisiana Literature and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry reader for Variant Literature and River Mouth Review.
