let the anvil melt
short works from my notes archive
This collection let the anvil melt takes its title from a line in A spell to honour your foremothers by Claire Askew: let the cat scream off into the dark/let the child find its own way out/let the anvil melt that whole house down around it thank you for reading — Sx
We had agreed no contact. Still, he emailed to say he recognised himself in one of my poems, that it had made him feel vulnerable and self-conscious. I wrote back to say: I have received the £3.50 flowers you sent me on Deliveroo from Co-Op. I enjoyed setting them on fire. Dianthus. Flower of the Gods By any other name would smell so cheap.
The light was blue. It filled the room. Received 5 January 2017. I kept it. It made me feel seen — “why aren’t you more confident I see so much potential in you” Sent at 02:52
1997
I always think about your face —
one headphone in,
collar popped on a vintage Burberry.
I remember that huge bath at your mum’s
it fit a bunch of us in,
tea cups in hand drinking stolen gin.
In my mind, you’re still in that room
slightly stoned, lying next to me
listening to Bittersweet Symphony.Wishing I was invisible, drinking pints at the bar hoping they would bloat me and float me off into obscurity. I never knew what you wanted from me. It was all glass eyes and trap doors and pretending not to have feelings.I stay awake until 3 a.m. just to hear silence — a nervous system wired for violence.
An ex-boyfriend of mine once told me I was emotionally frigid. [What a phrase. I loved it.] After all that time I cut a different figure in the hallway. Maybe too thin. Two stone in a month. Did I do it to spite him? We don’t need a therapist to answer that. Make sure you stay sexy, girls. Let that be the lesson. Don’t get comfortable. Don’t let your body breathe. They won’t say it. They’ll spit it in your face when you leave.
Four years ago my skin started to crawl. I wasn’t prepared at all. I was winter hellebore with a neck unable to keep my head from drooping. I can only look at the pavement, at my feet. I don’t want to meet, I just want the vintage Armani jacket back. I didn’t mean to buy you that. Purchases made during dissociation are null and void. I thought you’d have better manners. No idea why. We all love to seize an opportunity. Did you infect me whilst we slept? I could have sworn that before you I never clawed at my skin at all.
The thermostat is on 21
still, it’s dead in here
just the foggy steam of my own breath
and frozen-over hornets’ nests
I place my foot onto the icy step
slowly slip, reaching for your hand
you turn to powder — snow
a disintegrating safety netego-dystonic.
I’m telling the doctor, the urge to stab myself in the neck is not an urge to die. Scores of pigeons scatter into a mass of grey cloud over Trafalgar Square. Standing in front of the Seagram Murals, you wipe a tear from my eye. White roses collect on a coffin, petals beneath scattered earth. I smell your scent on a stranger who walks by.I watch shadows climb the bricks of my bedroom wall wishing the moment between blinking and breathing did not feel like both an eternity and something that hadn’t happened at all. I flatten mosquitos and moths with a flip-flop, spend a week in bed wishing to God that I’d just let them live. I am sorry we cannot find the heartbeat. Yes, it is unusual. Let’s just get started shall we.
I should say from the start that although I sometimes write in fragments myself, I paradoxically have very little tolerance for fragmented work as a reader, precisely because not everyone knows how to do it. When it is done badly it feels like a shortcut, a way of avoiding the harder work of sustained narrative. So I came to this with a particular kind of resistence. The opening section with the flowers could have bored me to death. I hate wit heavy irony. I could write an essay on how much I dislike wit. And yet it worked. It made me fear the whole piece would be like that, and then it was not. What disarmed me was realising the irony was not the destination, it was a way of building expectations in order to dismantle them, and that dismantling is part of how the piece functions itself. Dianthus is the moment where you realise you know what you are doing. “Would smell so cheap” closes on three levels at once, the flower, the relationship, and the act of sending flowers as an apology. The 02:52 message section is, in my view, the most formally brillant. That timestamp carries real weight. “Sent at 02:52” says everything about who that man was and the state you were in. Then 1997 is the most vulnerable piece. The form is more traditional, less defensive. It lands even harder precisely because it comes after sections that are heavily armoured. The prose section on ego-dystonic thought is where the collection becomes something larger. It is not disorganised, it is how dissociation actually works, that juxtaposition of the grandiose and the mundane. “Shall we” is unbearable in the best way. British politeness as a form of polite violence. There would be another three hundred things to say, but I risk never finishing. What sets you apart from others working in this style is your restraint. You know when to stop. You never overreach or push the reader with the idea of impact for its own sake. It hits, but I am never forced to feel that it is hitting me. It just happens. And I think that restraint is not only aesthetic, in a collection that deals with relational violence, with control, with bodies held under pressure, choosing not to exert pressure on the reader is also an ethical act. The form mirrors the content in reverse: where the relationships described force and withhold, the writing lets go.
Woah Suzie! This should be in print! You write with such strength and courage 🖤🖤🖤