Sass combining parent using ampersand (&) with type selectors

I am having trouble with nesting in Sass. Say I have the following HTML:

<p href="#" class="item">Text</p>
<p href="#" class="item">Text</p>
<a href="#" class="item">Link</a>

When I try to nest my styles in the following I get a compiling error:

.item {
    color: black;
    a& {
        color:blue;
   }
}

How do I reference a type selector before the parent selector when it is part of the same element?