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Sarah Nichols

Collision Ritual: Maeve

After Westworld

My body glows:

the last true creature of
the electric air.

I am all invisible silver memories, that
reel of violence and desire,

the infinite future.

I feel my wounds again: a door,
a new orbit,

motionless.

I am the queen of unimagined technologies:
dials, chromium

my body, my scars

fragmenting,
surgical

my last installation, my new

language.


This is a found poem. Source: Ballard, J.G. Crash. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973. Print.


Robot Abattoir

After Westworld


Here,

brides are stripped bare
to their circuits.

blood wires wiped clean

cauterized

into the neon flare of the last days,

the last sighs of the
red world.

The dreamless

ghosts of

do you remember.


The Fire and the Church

After Westworld


Science could never
protect them from

the burn. Mazes are
traced in the ashes,

read like cards or entrails:
misery, begging for release.

The church is still standing,
mistaken for holy salvage.

But it is only another dead end.

You end up here again and again

wanting to believe that god or
money

will anoint you.

This place only destroys.

You should know this by

now.


Note: In the fall of 2018, Southern California experienced some of the worst fires in recent memory. Warner Brothers Studio, where some of Westworld is filmed, lost one of its sets to the fire, except for one building: a church.


Exit Music: Maeve

After Westworld and Radiohead’s “Exit Music (for a Film)”


The Real World is
ripe enough for burning.

I walk through it, a woman

real enough to escape.

I breathe out my nerves—
the circuits they want me
to die from.

I hear
my daughter’s last song
over

(“Welcome to Westworld”)

So small, laughter breaking
a loop of us

dying together

pushes me back into the world of
whatever-I-was.

Her mother. Her voice.


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