by Helen Ivory | Dec 31, 2021 | Featured, Poetry, Twelve Days of Christmas
New Year 2022 Lips kissed at midnight, we skitter home, twist off rimy pavements like kittens on black ice, think how returning takes forever. We try to squint at the twelvemonth ahead but our eyeballs are bobbed plums, rollicking spirit-levels...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 30, 2021 | Featured, Poetry, Twelve Days of Christmas
Clara is just another girl, dreaming in her deep pink world of sugar mice and sugar plums. Young enough to fall for the charms of clockwork and blue-eyed dolls with ballerina sherbet swirls of layered net; light enough to sit on uncles’ laps,...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 30, 2021 | News
Please join us on zoom for live readings from Kim Moore, Jeremy Dixon and Christopher Horton on 2nd January 2022, at 4pm UTC This is part of our monthly award-winning ‘Live from the Butchery’ series, hosted by Helen Ivory and Martin Figura from their home (an...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 29, 2021 | Featured, Poetry, Twelve Days of Christmas
Nativity ‘Lullay, lullay.’ Can you hear her sing, so far from here, crouched on bloodied straw, beside the phlegmatic ox? ‘Lullay, lullay, my little child, may we know peace tonight.’ She sings, and learns, against her weary heart, the peace he...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 28, 2021 | Featured, Poetry, Twelve Days of Christmas
Elbow Room We travel home (ignoring that we lost it years ago) in time for turkey, mistletoe, for ear-worms to re-cast the brain. We check out the reindeer hanging on the third branch up, its always spot, now single antlered and rubbed free of...