by Helen Ivory | May 15, 2021 | Featured, Poetry
Traffic Your name kicks my arse nearly as far as the roundabout where Jenny and Kim lounge on the grass trying to get a tan. Fate gave them their pasty skin, or their parents did anyway, emoting shut-eyed karaoke in the snug of their local...
by Helen Ivory | May 14, 2021 | Featured, Poetry
Does it hurt? You were lying when you said it wouldn’t – the measles vaccine, the own brand tampon, rows of dead jellyfish on Dyffryn beach. Leaving that place to come home each summer, leaving home at the end of that summer and never coming back....
by Helen Ivory | May 13, 2021 | Featured, Poetry
In a moment of absence The road whispers in a language not heard these seventy years the sea eats only its pebbles and can be heard calling its kinfolk who listen can listen now the sea can be heard and all the candy floss falls strangely silent...
by Helen Ivory | May 12, 2021 | Featured, Poetry
Back to Work This morning I made eye contact with myself for the entirety of a 48-minute video interview. My manager asked me where I see myself in five years’ time. My Mum says I am careless. I forget to switch off the hob, walk around with my...
by Helen Ivory | May 11, 2021 | Featured, Poetry
’Twas a long summer of thin air after Vera Iliatova’s ‘Cruel Month’ (2010) Of a drier Sahara. Of the sun living late into the nights; waking before dawn. Of cattledeaths and heatstrokes. Of brown cities in a gas chamber. Of distant, trailing...
by Helen Ivory | May 10, 2021 | Featured, Poetry
At Home with Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy White lilies wilt in the window of number four Park Road. A paper lamp’s stranded in space. No one’s ever in. On my way home from school I invent owners: glamourous Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy from the...
