from Muminent
in the manuscript of Hollingsworth’s
Mancuniensis at Chetham’s Library
a blank page before the frontispiece
bears the graphite inscription Mum. A.6 .51
a corruption of Mun
used to signifying filing
in the muniments room
of Manchester Cathedral
*
since its foundation in fourteen twenty-one
the capitular archives
have been misplaced, displaced and replaced
as frequently as the collegiate
church was dissolved and reformed
the missing archives
of the late sixteenth century
led to erroneous accounts
that nothing remarkable occurred
relating to the church in the fifteen sixties
*
I prefer to think the title a neologism
of Manchester and amanuensis
although the suffix
-ensis transforms toponym
into adjective
*
in No Archive Will Restore You Julietta Singh
references Derrida’s Archive Fever
noting that etymologically
‘arkhē is the place from which everything
emerges, the location from which the thoughts
and things of the world spring forth’
it is also the ‘place of authoritative law’
Arkhē is the womb and matriarch
*
where would I begin to unravel
her body archive
I was gestating while capital
punishment was abolished
completely in the United Kingdom
excluding the nightly
demolitions of self by self
in a process of becoming
when the towers fell
I was pre-symbolic, entire
toddling to harvest tears
wept for the televised disaster
setting the precedent
for a lifetime
of crises
make me a channel of your fears
*
Hollingsworth had an almost modern
preoccupation with the weather
his meteorological entries were disregarded
as irrelevant, lacking weft
yet who can dampen the significance
of weather in the rainy city
atmosphere awash with rivers
moist conditions were supposedly
conducive to the cotton trade as fibres
become brittle in dry air, yet stay
strong and stretchy with the correct
humidity, perfect for spinning into yarn
during the Lancashire Cotton Famine
after years of unprecedented growth
and surplus production, impoverished
mill workers refused to touch raw
cotton picked by enslaved Africans
on plantations in Southern states
Abraham Lincoln expressed his gratitude
to ‘the workingmen at Manchester’
praising their ‘sublime Christian heroism’
in facilitating the foul blot’s erasure
*
my mum has been signed off
sick with work-related stress
the past year her eyes carried
panniers like a packhorse
she was not listening to the body
disavowing its biological responses
as if they were gadflies
swarming around the pain
I have been writing
about her illness since a diagnosis
of hemochromatosis
collecting loose leaves of notes
in a mumorandum
the blood condition is hereditary
it likely occupies my iron-bound chest
what further information is helixed
away inside the only son
the ‘destroying Angell’ of blood
∩
Tom Branfoot is a poet and critic 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.