person Sarah Nichols, three poems

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 also appeared in Five:2:One Magazine, the Ekphrastic Review, Drunk Monkeys, and FreezeRay.

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After My Mother’s Death, “Mother” and “Death” Become Predictive Text

My mother is
My mother was
My mother is nowhere

She is everywhere
In the predictive text of my tongue, she is

abandonment

My mother’s body is ash in
a blue marble box

I did not see my mother’s soul ascend to heaven
when she died

My mother is without pain now

My mother is gone

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After My Mother’s Death, I Eat at Chipotle

I take a seat in the back. The
lunch time crowd is thinning, and I
wonder if I can eat

grief. This is what I have instead of
casseroles and cheese trays, the
meals prepared by others that are

supposed to last for days.

Mother, I think, is another word for food. Or
maybe it’s another word for mouth.

You’re eating too much. You’re eating too
little. The purple tartan skirt, the one I wore

in fifth grade, is enough reason for

weight watchers.

Food is another word for drug.

The one we shared, arms entwined,

feeding each other, saying

the diet will work.
This hole will be closed.

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After My Mother’s Death, A Man Asks Me if I’m Ready to Accept Jesus

It might be two or three weeks later. Heat-
groggy, waiting on a bus to take me
home.

Over-turned grocery cart metal digs into
my thighs, thinking that the afterlife

could be anything, and I shade my eyes
against a Christian soldier who asks if

I’m ready to accept Jesus

as my lord and savior.

No. Can he pray for me ? I tell
him to pray someplace else and I

wonder what my mother, who was fine with
me saying

motherfucker but not

goddamn

would say.

I have fights to pick with Jesus, questions
a five year old would ask:

why did you let her die ?

Doesn’t her being a nun mean anything to you at all ?

Did she find you in all the religious tracts that
covered her bed in the

nursing home ?

I wait for signs. A dim star where she
can make a collect call. The heaven she
was

promised.

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