by Helen Ivory | Mar 23, 2017 | 2017 poetry picks, Prose & Poetry
servant of the living word a chill breeze pours over me from the night window, what baptism should have felt like had God existed when I was fully immersed, decades ago, in a Wisconsin lake, a disassembly and then a remembering, a being shaken...
by Helen Ivory | Mar 21, 2017 | Prose & Poetry
Bruised Grass Hauled by a Cudworth Mail Engine, the South Eastern Railway express from Folkestone to Cannon Street grey-green like hawthorn. A lady and her companion in a first-class compartment. She wears a bonnet trimmed with arctic fox. He...
by Helen Ivory | Mar 20, 2017 | Prose & Poetry
It was impossible to exit stage left (Princess Charlotte, Leicester) It’s my stage. Framed by two speaker stacks, sounddesk either left at standard rock setting or frantically manipulated by the band’s sound engineer, in the low...
by Helen Ivory | Mar 19, 2017 | Prose & Poetry
By Harrow Road Against dusk’s bands of scarlet-velvet light, a Jehovah’s Witness clutches a crumpled Book of apocalypse, and glowers at a slammed front door. Behind her, part in dare, part pulled by blues, nonchalant to foretold doom, a...
by Helen Ivory | Mar 18, 2017 | 2017 poetry picks, Prose & Poetry
Crossing the English channel by foot- I’ll make Dieppe by tea-time. I push images of that great bolt of fluid streaming out of Shoreham sewage treatment plant, snaking towards Brighton beach, out of my mind, striding into the churned, murky...
by Helen Ivory | Mar 17, 2017 | Prose & Poetry
Asbestos Sure he smoked, but it was the asbestos that killed him. The men in suits came to remind us that back then the stuff was in everything and not to even think about pinning it on them. We had him cremated, he went the way of the coal he’d spent most of...
