Megan Nichols
poetry
Megan Nichols is the author of the chapbook Animal Unfit (Belle Point Press, 2023). Her poems have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Poetry Daily, Plume, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for Write Bloody’s 2021 Jack McCarthy Book Prize and the 2024 Peseroff Poetry Prize. She was the Honorary Mention for the 2026 Gwenn A. Nusbaum / WWBA Scholarship. She serves as Managing Editor at Variant Literature. She lives in the Arkansas Ozarks.
Suspended Belief
Swimming beneath the swinging bridge
so much is Ozark green—the water's surface,
our necks, my skin beneath your silver.
Face to face we bob, our feet softly kicking
each other. It’s nothing to untie a string. To
let
fabric rise and float. Who could see? Everyone
is working but us. We have to make a choice:
Move to the riparian zone, do this under dense
cover, wrapped in smartweed, poison ivy.
Or brave smooth bank, laid out like a brash snake
heating itself over polished stone. I keep treading
in possibility and this is why I’m with you: you pull me
by the wrist, through the water, out of options.
Vehicles begin to rattle above us, freeing rough
chert between the steel cables and rotting beams.
I collect the fallen rocks in the concave of my back.
Eyes shut, I could be anywhere; we could be anything.
They could be diamonds. This could be dancing.
“ I set out to write a love poem but found myself describing something less straightforward. In editing, beyond the relationship itself, I was also thinking about age—about maturity, and the kinds of situations young people can drift into. ”