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.