by Helen Ivory | Feb 24, 2015 | Prose & Poetry
The Cleaving Rain The rain tapped soft holes into Beth’s sleep and she awoke saturated with sweat. A dream slipped away beneath the dark surface. The sky had been falling all night, dropping like flakes of wet plaster. Beside her, Ben gave up clouds of...
by Helen Ivory | Feb 23, 2015 | Prose & Poetry
Eastbourne We’re the youngest guests at the Queen’s Hotel – and you’re 52. It’s the summer solstice and we’re breaking up except we’re making love on the fifth floor in an evening light as yolky as an afternoon. The sexy doom of the split is like falling...
by Helen Ivory | Feb 22, 2015 | Prose & Poetry
The Ghost Hotel I walk with my skin open in the hotel for ghosts. They are here because they had secrets. I will have none. They are always opening and closing the doors, a constant latching behind my back. If I laugh it’s because I thought the word ‘liminal’. I...
by Helen Ivory | Feb 21, 2015 | Prose & Poetry
Hold the Baby They said she had to hold the baby so she held the baby even though she had no notion why she held it, him or her. They said she couldn’t look to see so in her mind she thought of it as both, a Jenny and a James, and she knew...
by Helen Ivory | Feb 20, 2015 | Prose & Poetry
Tinkering Among the Machines I wonder what kind of game you thought you were playing with all those bodies. Just another part of a machine to be tinkered with, moved around, broken and not repaired. What a scrapyard of ghosts you made, what a massacre...
by Helen Ivory | Feb 19, 2015 | Prose & Poetry
Occupation We try to fettle the spaces around us – the pile of books on a bedside table; the chronology of an artist’s work in a gallery; the lay-out of fields and roads, hedged and fenced, across wild land. Here the middle of the field is a shore, A...
