Melanie Branton

Anxiety is a mother

who won’t let you go to the fairground
because the rides will collapse, sees broken bones
behind the coloured lights, hears screams
beneath the laughter. There’s a haunted house
and a hall of mirrors. Everything looks taller and thinner
or shorter and fatter than it really is, and skeletons
rattle out at you from behind every corner. It’s blood
that turns the candy floss pink, human flesh roasts
on the braziers, alongside the chestnuts and the frankfurters,
comes with fried onions and ketchup, mustard and mayo. Death
goes round and round on a clanking mechanism, can be won
by chucking a ball at a coconut, by firing a toy gun at long range.
She hands you death in a puddle of dirty water
in a polythene bag, a dart and glint of orange fin.
You take it home and keep it as a pet.

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Melanie Branton is a poet, spoken word artist and education worker from Bristol in the UK. Her published collections are My Cloth-Eared Heart (Oversteps, 2017) and Can You See Where I’m Coming From? (Burning Eye, 2018). Recent work has been published in Black Nore Review, Dreich, Poetry Salzburg Review and Poetry Wales. She was longlisted in the UK Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition 2022.