by Helen Ivory | Dec 10, 2017 | Prose & Poetry
Potluck What do you bring to the table? A bunch of sweet-smelling herbs in a clenched fist, a salad of green leaves plucked today and drenched in tears, a loaf of bread studded with seeds as hard as pearls, a serrated knife with teeth that cut to...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 8, 2017 | Prose & Poetry
Soul-Bird When I see you walk, stiff-legged, over the shingle, I wonder whose child you are, which widow waits for you, cursing the water. You spar and snatch for lukewarm chips, your bright bill jabbing vehemently, red-tipped, as if you’d...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 7, 2017 | Prose & Poetry
The Pine Tree The inside of its bark is red, its heartwood is red; when a branch is cut the wound is red and it weeps, not blood, but thick white tears. Gill McEvoy, winner of the 2015 Michael Marks Award for The First Telling...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 6, 2017 | Prose & Poetry
Family Man Hullabaloo unframes this night, the hide and seek of vixen and dog fox: the bark of both, a crack through slate. The miner’s hut is curtain free, open to whim. A bottle grins its emptiness; the vagrant curls into childhood. His...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 5, 2017 | Prose & Poetry
Happi–ness— I can map all the rivers in my head. I know their history. How many bodies they’ve carried. The cities they cut through. I know the dates this one flooded the abutments of the Pont Alexandre and reached for the wrists of nymphs. When...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 4, 2017 | Prose & Poetry
Thaw Leeks and cutlery bent beyond belief. Hitler’s descant recorder and the Valleys school where they had sacrificed one meerkat from Chester Zoo every January. After the warming the free coffin lid that for years housed the real Mona Lisa and a...
