American Horror Story: Coven
Nicholas Goodly
Madison Montgomery is a complex figure in a show about witches and stardom and not being wanted and loving a man who kills his mother but his mother laid every kind of hand on him so when it happens you’re cheering for him and you feel terrible about how you feel but he is a zombie anyway but a handsomely made one and the girl he ends up with is a witch who kills whoever she has sex with when she lets someone inside of her they don’t come out alive but since he’s already dead their sex doesn’t matter and it’s not clear if she loves him because he’s the only man she could share herself with until Madison dies and is brought back to life and Madison convinces the zombie boy and black widow to all make love together but it’s ok because in a way they’re all in a practical understanding already dead and when they sleep together it’s a kind of unrest and this other girl has this curse slash power to make people feel what she would be feeling if she could feel or puts her pain on others like the time she dipped her hand in hot chicken grease and it scalded a man’s hands even though he never reached for the chicken and also her pleasure she fought off a minotaur by standing in front of it and masturbated and although she couldn’t feel it she rubbed the lips of her womanhood and he felt it in his bull parts and he huffed a little because no one had touched him since he’d been turned into that monster it happened against his will and he couldn’t change back and even though she wasn’t really touching him it felt like pleasure and she could nearly come off of the feeling she was giving him but he must not have liked her touching him like that feeling without a hand laid on him it was a cheating kind of love making so instead of kissing her he finished her off ran a horn into her she in a way got what she wanted a spirit brutally running through her a hot bloody tusk taking her breath away it’s scary when a stupid scene like that ends up touching you.
Nicholas Goodly is the author of Black Swim (Copper Canyon, 2022). They are a team member of the performing arts platform Fly on a Wall and Poetry Editor for Wussy Magazine. Nicholas was a finalist for the 2020 Jake Adam York Prize, runner-up for the 2019 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and recipient of the 2017 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship, among other awards. Their work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, The New Yorker, Boston Review, BOMB, The Poetry Project, Lambda Literary, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere.