Tom Branfoot

Tom Branfoot is a writer from Bradford, and the writer-in-residence at Manchester Cathedral. He won a Northern Debut Award for Poetry in 2024 and the New Poets Prize 2022. He organises the poetry reading series More Song in Bradford. Tom is the author of This Is Not an Epiphany (Smith|Doorstop) and boar (Broken Sleep Books), both published in 2023.

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from Real Presence

beneath stone pines    ducklings flocked regardless

    we hid from the portent    among curios

figurine teardrops teemed in the courtyard

     polished sapphire       mineral futurism

   two centuries old dewy aureoles

   fruited from porcelain boles     the earth-toned

   craquelure of rot         if floodwater rose

would taxidermy whales return to sea

we were not so different from those wax

anatomical models     translucent

inbuilt with movable parts     to regard

lovelight     gleaming within our fleshland

I am flayed and veined for you alone

for us I clenched a goldfinch in the hand

for us I clenched a goldfinch in my hand

licked the edges of words    to burn slower

      it was lead cold in Bologna     

we hardly saw the city’s rosso stone

         winded by Guttuso’s Funerali

di Togliatti its radical assembly

ragazzi screams of swifts the morning

    I decided to kneel     porticoes melting

on our fragile heads the art was meant to be 

   reality         burnt plastic our wounds

light played piano in the gallery

and the gesture took on a sculptural property

I’m sick of the pressure to experience          so now

just this         birdsong light empirical heat

just this    birdsong light empirical heat

      I started expressing my milky love

for you      as we were swept up by a crowd

it could have been emergency but the meadowsweet

was flawless        humid air recalls semen

the church a cold shower    casting shadows

on everything it could not own

poor art that it should suffer censorship

finance’s alarming onus

I came here to be moved by politics

under the portico a swallow’s nest

young mouths        screaming at inconsistency

       they struggle in an exhibition space

that cannot fully contain their hunger

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