by Helen Ivory | Mar 24, 2020 | Featured, Poetry
Bus Stop Etiquette We roll up piecemeal, shuffled rush-hour pack in all weathers; fix envious glares into underoccupied kerbcrawl cars blaring rock, pop, classical, duh-duh-duh dance and dumbass ads. It’s Britain so we queue; eyecontactless, heads...
by Helen Ivory | Mar 23, 2020 | Featured, Poetry
Snowdrift From solitude to servitude I went: a stepmother’s bane, to maid-of-all-work for grubby curmudgeons. dust sweep scrub sleep How the chores call to me, a broom-brush song that bristles at my hearing’s edge. How grudgingly I...
by Helen Ivory | Mar 22, 2020 | Featured, Poetry
A Sudden Shaft of Light My demented mother who doesn’t know me anymore, looks up as I come into the room. Ach – there’s my wee darling Moyra she says, such love in her voice that everything falls away but love. The slate is clean, and I, new...
by Helen Ivory | Mar 21, 2020 | Featured, Poetry
Lullaby for the Child I Will Never Have Sometimes, in my dreams, I sing to you of mice running up the clock, of four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. I love you too much for fledglings severed by magpies: I found a chick once – feathers...
by Helen Ivory | Mar 20, 2020 | Featured, Poetry, Prose
Sunday Dress Ileana loved to make clothes. Afternoons after school she sat at my worktable, arranging patterns like jigsaw pieces to fit a length of fabric. These skills I taught her, daughter of my daughter, because her mother was not around to...
