After Westworld

I give them these relics of the future:

 music, battered punch cards, instrumentals that
unspool

on repeat, a song just out of memory’s grasp. It
could be from

twenty years ago, or the tomorrow that is

twenty years from whatever now is.

Every loop a melody,
a premature elegy or one

that arrives on time, greeting you
with all the deaths

you’ve died

before.

piece re-homed from Queen Mob’s Teahouse

Sarah Nichols lives and writes in Connecticut. She is the author of eight chapbooks, including She May Be a Saint (Porkbelly Press, 2019) and Dreamland for Keeps (Porkbelly, 2018.) Her poems and essays can also be found in Ghost City Review, Isacoustic, and Five:2:One Magazine.