by Helen Ivory | Oct 9, 2023 | Featured, Poetry
Refugee I know the earth belongs to you in the same way the moon does. You’re the unspoken clause, the question nobody wants: how bad does it have to be to begin an inventory of what you can take: the clothes you stand up and lie down in, the...
by Helen Ivory | Oct 8, 2023 | Featured, Poetry
Ashes They wake in the small hours in the country house, long miles from Hudiksvall. Moonlit snow lies thick. Dark pines shelter the still garden, their shadows lie elongated, spear-head sharp, on crystal whiteness. Dawn comes late. Always dark...
by Helen Ivory | Oct 7, 2023 | Featured, Poetry
CW: Rape Olives Healing is exchanging rape anecdotes, sitting on a bench outside a pub, eating fat green olives and drinking Guinness. How do you begin? She says, new fringe tickling her eyelids, When the body has its own indelible memory? There’s...
by Helen Ivory | Oct 6, 2023 | Featured, Poetry
In My Sister’s Arms When she boarded the ship off the coast of Libya, waters were calm and skies flat blue. She stayed afloat with refugees for days, sharing rice and beans, stories of their left-behinds, never to be seen again abodes. And as they...
by Helen Ivory | Oct 5, 2023 | Featured, Poetry
A Thousand Miles —to Ibtisam Barakat I dedicate this to you, my Palestinian friend, walking a thousand miles for all the other refugees who had to walk from war, from poverty from genocide, from repression carrying what they could in a shoe box or...
by Helen Ivory | Oct 4, 2023 | Featured, Poetry
Exposure Therapy For your fear of spiders? Behold, I have sourced this perspex box and this adult Goliath Birdeater, a type of tarantula which, interestingly, and contrary to its name, rarely eats birds at all. So I think you know what’s coming. I...
