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Streetlight, hung and quartered on the bedroom wall,
Draws out a sun to my year of somnambulance.
Four times I spoke my own destruction, foresaw
The moral to the myth and was indifferent;
Then the butchered rotation, from him, to her, to it,
Never this, as I watch recompense fall from heaven’s
Breaks and play spectator to my own eclipse.
Betrayal is deep-chambered and swallows its sound,
Turns last of all to itself, weary of revelation.
No gates to hell, no flames, no cavernous pain,
Only the silent surrender - to watch not feel
The world dismembered, laid out cadaverous;
At its hollowed heart, two lovers in a sliding bed,
Are a train of horses tethered by a single thread.
IXION
by Olivia Cowley
Illustrations by Chloe Dootson-Graube
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