Alexandra Melville

Motion picture industry

New York, we’ve been flirting for years & I can’t
get near you. I want to rub myself in your yellow
cabs at night, get gorged on your Liberty torch.
There’s always something keeping us apart:

debt, disease… some fear. Surely you never cared
for constraint? Compulsive as 24/7 rolling news –
how long it’s been since we hooked up behind the
museum & snogged beside the exhibition guard!

I want to give a frankfurter a blow job & O’Hara
my way to a defiant party upstairs, a private affair –
New York, I don’t believe you even exist in public.
I judge you from a distance as if we’re intimates:

You, you. Always. Never! I shriek into the traffic,
dumbly. How can a cosmopolis act so indifferent?
Your cologne has splashed across my wrists like
a billboard, so if I wrap myself up, I can pretend

you’re pulling me close. Let me read your thesis,
pet your bodega cats. I’ll hold your shaving soap.
Flash that spring dressing gown down the avenue!
I can’t get near you. I don’t believe you even exist.

Dog Days

 It doesn’t take much to set me back to that summer: the sound of a man
hammering the boards next door; a nearby alarm I can’t put a finger to.
I found crying into a sitz bath was the most efficient way to cry. I never
wanted to waste a thing, not even a marriage, my mother cautioned me.

All my friends were out of town that summer we crashed the car and then
just kept on crashing. I listened lovingly to podcasts about assisted dying.
Whenever I said hammer into my voice notes it wrote HA HA. I ate air.
Held it to my mouth and cried Look: this is what I have to eat. I grew fat

sucking the bones of my sadness. I was a guest in my own life that year:
in the end, it was strangers who fed me, showed me round. It took months
to learn what it meant to be nourished, to nourish myself. They never asked
for thanks, nor the bright little dog at the corner, who grinned his grin at me.

Alexandra Melville is a writer and teacher living in London, and author of how small we are, how little we know (Broken Sleep Books, 2022). Her poetry has appeared in The Rialto, Magma, The Moth, The Interpreter’s House, Bath Magg, Under The Radar, And Other Poems, among others. She was commended in the Forward Prizes 2021 and the Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2024, and shortlisted for Oxford Brookes’ International Poetry Competition 2022. Social media @AdotMelville.