by Helen Ivory | Nov 22, 2015 | 2015 poetry picks, Prose & Poetry
Secondhand He lived a well-meaning secondhand life, pants and shirt and soul a hand-me-down, ideas and thoughts the spitting image of someone else’s until that day when old wares are thrown away, the growing becomes hard, and lips part to say...
by Helen Ivory | Nov 21, 2015 | 2015 poetry picks, Prose & Poetry
Sibling I helped my mother pick ripe gooseberries loaded with their bitter seeds. She straightened up rested her hand on her vast belly – my sun was blotted out. I saw my mother rushed to hospital in a screaming ambulance. Days later she came home...
by Helen Ivory | Nov 20, 2015 | Prose & Poetry
A Conspiracy of Chapstick I think it’s for the same reasons that artists do their best work when they’re heart shattered, tormented or why musicians make better music when they haven’t been sober for longer than they can...
by Helen Ivory | Nov 19, 2015 | Prose & Poetry
Extract from March haiku / tanka Jorie Graham wrote ‘the past is senseless.’ Yet I strive to make sense of the present by understanding the past. During Lent this year, we stayed in an old Provençal house in Provence Verte. There was no internet...
by Helen Ivory | Nov 18, 2015 | Prose & Poetry
The Only Clue Despite the sun’s cutting crew finally braking through, our ozone layer being sliced in two like a climatic finale to end all shows. Despite office blocks and houses, retail parks and shopping centres, road humps everyone hates incinerating...
by Helen Ivory | Nov 17, 2015 | Prose & Poetry
Lemons When life sent lemons she could cleave them in two with just one blow. Then squeeze them dry with one hand till the juice ran down to her elbow. And the pips popped out. To that juice she’d add sugar. She’d make sweet lemonade. So what now?...
