Two Poems Inspired by Neon Demon by Sarah Nichols

Runway Horror: Pre-Fall Collection
After The Neon Demon (film, 2016)

Tyranny of glass—-

red strobes fold into blood

lady, bedroom lion,
gold dust burns suffocate

hungry ghosts close the show

and my body is not my body now
but an

initiate/antechamber of

screams

And oh, the kiss of dead things electric
every piece of me

the transubstantiation of beauty’s
nightmare.

I am your body

I am your blood

Devour me.

 Countess Bathory Vogue Shoot
After The Neon Demon (film, 2016)

I’m leaving the mirrored aviators on
while

the other girls pick her bones clean.

We soap ourselves with her blood, take
lingering baths in claw-footed tubs,

her blood so young and fresh
that she didn’t deserve all the

purity the magazines were so hot for.

I want a Vogue editorial covered with the
new skin she gave me

but full, too, of those rust stains
that never quite came off the corners of

my mouth

as I

licked her

youth away.

Sarah Nichols lives and writes in Connecticut. She is the author of ten chapbooks, including Press Play for Heartbreak (Paper Nautilus Press, forthcoming, 2021), and Hexenhaus (Milk and Cake Press, 2020.) She has recently started a fashion Instagram, @middleageglam, and continues to make art out of the collision of popular culture and personal memory.

Instagram: @onibabareplicant and @middleageageglam (I’ve been using that one more lately)

Twitter:@onibaba37