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...
by Helen Ivory | Mar 19, 2020 | Featured, Haibun, Tanka, Haiku & Haiga, Poetry
Hooking Up Civilization writ large shouts “all roads lead to Rome.” Civilization writ small builds the roads. The paper clip’s one of the latter, a civilizational bit player that resembles all the other clips swimming in the jar. Its...
by Kate Birch | Mar 18, 2020 | Featured, News, Picks of the Month
We live in uncertain times, and that voters chose ‘Death Rattle’ by Hannah Hodgson as the Ink Sweat & Tears Pick of the Month for February 2020 not only indicates their overwhelming admiration of the poem and the poet but is also an acknowledgement of...
