Mel Pryor

inside

(after a line by Walt Whitman)

Patient as the sun that sends out yellow filaments
you are so much smaller in stature, spider,  

than the scream you elicit in this house. Hanging
from your mantel gallows, neither terrorist  

nor suicide, you descend, you sway, and you climb,
thriving, alive! Face to face with fear,  

walking on air, how do you stand
being so misunderstood?  

Is it by this making from your own unravelling?
The room’s walls and corners are strung  

with your endeavours: threads within threads.
The window holds a web. Its whorls  

are like a fingerprint: your signature
against the world, against the pane.

Mel Pryor’s collection Small Nuclear Family (Eyewear, 2015) was described by the TLS as “a remarkable debut”. Recent work appears in The Emma Press Book of Beasts and The Poetry Review. In February she was the Scottish Poetry Library’s Blue Crevasse poet-in-residence.