by Helen Ivory | Dec 24, 2025 | Featured, Twelve Days of Christmas
Madonna del Parto A fresco by Piero della Francesca, c.1460 Piero painted her in a week, after his mother died, her azure gown split open like a ripe plum, her posh girl fingers resting on the mystery, all swollen belly and haloed radiance. She...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 23, 2025 | Featured, Twelve Days of Christmas
Interference This tree, unlike others we have used, is shorter than we are and grows in a glazed ceramic pot. What we might choose to call branches, in truth are no more than twigs. Still, we festoon them with coloured lights and glittery...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 22, 2025 | Featured, Twelve Days of Christmas
Mother of Pearl It was when your hair fell like snow I found it again. No longer moon blonde, time had coppered the hair auburn. The garage is where your roots grow. I found the plait of hair in a small blue suitcase with silvered clasps, two feet...
by Sairah Ahsan | Dec 21, 2025 | Filmpoems, Twelve Days of Christmas
When it used to snow wild and bottomless dad would take us sledging on the hills behind our house, we’d ride the sleeping-slopes of / round-back / giants, flushed with fever-thrill and when he capsized we / lurched / collided with a crunch. One year we...
by Sairah Ahsan | Dec 21, 2025 | Twelve Days of Christmas, Word & Image
Ferns There was a cold winding music a frozen answer. I knelt under time’s branches. The year the ferns sang. The year the ferns sang heard the lungs of every hillside dream my breath held the unfamiliar pedalled notes. I listened to violet reliance oh how the ferns...
