by Helen Ivory | Aug 3, 2015 | Prose & Poetry
Counting Sheep Single figures and your imagination has them as vague outlines, the cracked artex of the ceiling standing in for a fence. Double figures and you’ve mapped out the rest of the farm, a swathe of woodland over the bedroom...
by Helen Ivory | Aug 2, 2015 | Prose & Poetry
Night Shift Rats run across the A1 and fade into the hard shoulder. I shake my head, wind down the window, take deep breaths of iced air and bonfire remnants until I reach the services, park, and let my eyes close for a hundred seconds....
by Helen Ivory | Aug 1, 2015 | Prose & Poetry
Below the Feather Cuckoo agrees that the guts of a pig would make fine compost in the garden of Eden. His blatant attempts to deflect the butchering hoe of Adam didn’t work, cuckoo’s hot bowels would be plucked below...
by Helen Ivory | Jul 31, 2015 | Prose & Poetry
The Butcher’s Wife His hands are white as a princess’s, or milk, so the network of veins shows through as clear as a blueprint. They are cold, like the petals of lilies, marble-cool. The nails are kept short. He uses a brutal brush to scour...
by Helen Ivory | Jul 30, 2015 | Prose & Poetry
Fierce Love To be a lyre bird, dove…or pigeon: strong-clawed and sleek-feathered. To write songs of flight in italics against grey skies, and dig out the worms that dirt hides. To carry dawn home in my silky down, spread light across fields and town,...
by Helen Ivory | Jul 29, 2015 | Prose & Poetry
A Departure The lawn is overgrown, grass sprouts like unruly hair, the flowerbed bare where a patient trowel turned the soil gently, neatly. Intermittently, white sticks like little gravestones mark the spot where come spring green shoots will...
