Hello

      Anorexia Nervosa A vixen or a reason. A rave. No air, no sex, nor ovaries. An axe. A raven axe? O! No, sir! Arson, via an ex. Ore. A ravine. A rose. Nox.     Melanie Branton is a spoken word artist from Redfield in Bristol with three...

      Repeat On a bench outside Next, a punctured woman traces circles in the air with a pale finger while her thoughts leak out in a rill of mutterings. Nobody sees her in the busy emptiness of lunchtime. Inside my pocket two small shells – they are...

      Father He is sulphur, he is fire and brimstone, he is deep shame, the colour of night, sound of slamming doors. He is bitterest regrets, dark chocolate, olives and kale, The Telegraph and Magritte's pipe, the treachery of images. Moments replayed...

      Self-Portrait as an Old Schoolhouse Restless two-hundred-year-old village elder, a ragged playground of words, or is it weeds – fragments of chant to slaps of skipping rope. Sash windows, shoothered open, once shed ample light through dreich...

      Mausoleum A house is a machine for living in.- Le Corbusier I have never climbed a tree, never broken a bone and will never walk on water. I open my little window and worry about possibilities: imprudent intruders of bird or cat, the wind, the...

      The House Keeps Score The house keeps score in places no one checks any longer. A hairline crack behind the fridge. The soft dip in the hallway floor where grief learned how to pace. We didn’t mark the days after you left. We measured time by...

      Windless Day Night’s white noise is over. Day arises to stillness. Light crouches behind windows, presses through chinks. Dawn’s chorus conceals a speck of silence that casts a shadow stretching vast across the floor. Double-checking in the cereal...

      Flock In the charity shop I try on a coat flocked with fake shearling, shaved-soft almost: fibres fired onto plastic to fool the wrist. At home I snap it. A dust of fur lifts, hangs, then drifts onto the draining board, the bulb, the bruised...

      Letter to L You’re a character, a Roman numeral, an internet meme. Descendant from a peasant’s crook or cattle prod, you’re the twelfth letter of the alphabet, but missing from a baker’s dozen. You’re in every email I ever wrote, appearing in...

      Comfort Queens "As usual, we are joined today by about nine or ten gay men who follow me, and a legion of young queer women with anxiety who find me comforting." Trixie Mattel, via a Livestream Being quiet and easily tired by being alive among...

      A Prayer for Rima With echoes of the Arabic lullaby ‘yalla tnam’ Maybe after your bath— you will sit for a moment, the towel will hold you close like a quiet prayer— يا رب، نامت الطفلة، يا رب خلّيها تنام Ya Rab, the child sleeps, oh Lord, help her...

TThe mirror in your apartment where I saw you praying through the angle of the door Now hangs only in my mind             I breathe on its glass wipe away fly specks Tsyotsya but there is only the empty kitchen          in the tower block in Volodymyr The rhomboids of...

      Wight Sirens Sing silver times, shimmering columns of light on the wine-dark, temple to moon-eyed Hecate, the insatiable. Sing treachery, dizzy with stars, sudden squalls, sting of our stink, pianissimo of sighing, undying, true-to-only-you-oo...

      Seven Sisters Road We rolled out on Seven Sisters Road, two crates of Tyskie empty in my stairwell. We were talking from the chest, walking backwards crackling air above our heads like streetlights beatboxing, spitting Maccies adverts at us sounds...