by Helen Ivory | Dec 14, 2019 | 2019 poetry picks, Prose & Poetry
Titles of my autobiography I have discarded -Everything I know I learned from my mother -Life changed the second time my sister went into hospital -Shame is a social construct -My first day at nursery, the teacher blushed when I described an aubergine -While my...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 13, 2019 | Prose & Poetry
The Poet’s Wife Delivers a Comeuppance I tried to talk to you, but words always stood in the way. I have to write a poem today, you explained. It’s about trains. And that was as close as I got. So it shouldn’t need explaining that you have to go now, quickly. Here’s...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 12, 2019 | Prose & Poetry
Tree Past foil-wrapped dark liqueurs, cough-mixture sick, he shins up the tinsel-twisted plastic boughs, dust musted, under chocolate snowmen, to browse the halls of elongating sideshow-trick glass, shaped like upturned teardrops, bells, a pear, and snake vines of...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 11, 2019 | Prose & Poetry
That’s me After Woman in a Hat (Olga) 1935: Pablo Picasso. Woman in a hat, nineteen thirty five, that’s me, something of a clown off balance minus the bold red lips, just a squiffy slit of a mouth set in a crescent moon of nauseous green and with black...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 10, 2019 | 2019 poetry picks, Prose & Poetry
Peninkulma The precise distance at which a dog’s bark dissolves into nothing. Much further, you might think, in the snow-soft forests of Scandinavia than some dormitory suburb, or a small town whose sleep is still measured by the hourly chime of a...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 9, 2019 | Prose & Poetry
Too late it becomes apparent that this is one of those poems in which the teasingly unresolved title doubles as the opening line soon after which, you find you’ve lost the will to persevere with it, zoning out and moving on before...
