by Helen Ivory | Sep 28, 2021 | Featured, Poetry
Outcrops Heaps topped by smaller rocks. The raffish angles of designer boulders. Jenga towers of tipsy stone. Lizard colony. Ombligo de Venus. Navelwort in paradise. Darkness; damp. Foxgloved fissures. Small pools filling fingerholds: finger...
by Helen Ivory | Sep 27, 2021 | Featured, Poetry
Vaccine The needle hits the deltoid with a moon-cold urgency; its jolt of fluid is ice barely thawed. Relax – sharp scratch. I hold myself against this detergent-white light. On the journey home, my pupils dilate: for the first time in months, I...
by Helen Ivory | Sep 26, 2021 | Featured, Poetry
The Poetry Arm Today was all left-handed. I’ve slapped it on the wrist, wrapped what it’s written, hidden in a file, locked behind a password: a little bomb of bitterness I couldn’t post online. My left hand’s the clumsy one blundering on the...
by Helen Ivory | Sep 15, 2021 | Featured, Poetry
Grooming My brain was full of hair that you wanted to brush, style like a dolly. Good dolly. You worked your way up to stroking it, as if I were fleshy, jellyfish tendrils, that I might sting you if I wasn’t ready. You gathered the threads of my...
by Helen Ivory | Sep 14, 2021 | Featured, Poetry
I’m pulling my hair out again and I worry that this is how the children will remember me. As balls of tangled fluff, that roll lazily under the sofa, to snag later in the hoover. Will they curse me every time they have to empty the bag? Take it...