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    The Gravity of Abattoirs

    Flowers of mercury
    fall from our mouths.

    Thoughts crepitate
    on bleached stone

    and briars curl
    in the thickets

    bones lie
    in the dust of lunar oceans.

    Moss undulates

    but in your liver
    a china pebble stirs

    and the skies
    are vaulted with
    arterial tracery.



    Doppelgänger

    We live above. Despite the loll
                of heavy blooms
    termite feudality
    reigns

    ignore our lungs
    of steel wool

    we are pillars of decay
    wrapped in a pall

    cauls of coal
    long forgotten

    homes
    a lake of mercury
                petrified woods
    Far down below. Slowly bells toll.



    Uprooted

    When shores crumble
    flee to the woods

    weave a wattle throne
    find leaves for your hair
    make an arbour
    of silence and decay

    settle your flurries

    these places are the robes
    often forgotten
    but they remember

                when our kings
                wrote
                on the flayings of
                forest gods

                when artifice mirrored
                the groves in stone.

    Now,
    jingling
    staring up at
    the branch which
    hangs us

    torn from the
    cocoon

    black avalanches
    muffle the green bells.

    There are no runes
    in the knot of the noose.
    The silver is too heavy
    the air too thin.

     

    Marcus Berian Nicholls currently lives in London, where he is studying for a PhD in Adaptation Studies and Decadent Literature. His work has appeared in The Missing Slate and the anthology The Dance Is New (Mardibooks).

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