Tag Archives: Lucia Larsen

The siren call of spores

collapsing a thousand times over, on playgrounds, faking
an aneurysm for mourners, in basements, play-acting a

mummy in a sarcophagus of mould, waiting to be unearthed,
across graveyards, a mime rehearsing rigor mortis, becoming

an addict of boundaries, the kind capped in amber bottles, taken
under the tongue, smeared across mottled skin, again and again

subsumed by newly dug earth to manifest my petrification,
edging the temptation of solidity, I become a peep show

for fungi, but breaking the barrier of the one-way glass, they
gather around my clogged ears and whisper horror stories

of decay with the lilt of a worshipper, evoking detritus that 
explodes into a thousand different flavours on your tongue, 

grit that disperses into a thousand different textures across your skin,
rot that settles into a thousand different aromas under your nose, 

they summon an existence where the colours race through us, 
unlined and restless, and where our insides flicker through 

moulds, morphing through masses, they threaten me with 
decomposition, the enemy of my bottled vice, the antithesis 

to a congealed sense of self, over-powering the sweet draught
of rigor mortis, will I be anyone at all, or will I be, dare I say it, 

so much that it cannot be spoken, or tasted, or smelt, or unearthed, 
will I become too much even for myself, and will I then be reborn as 

an addict of dissolution?

Lucia Larsen (she/her) is currently studying for her MSc in Environmental Management at the University of Stirling. Her published work can be viewed at linktr.ee/lucialarsen and she can be found on Twitter @mslucialarsen.

photo by Zhen Hu (via unsplash)