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...
by Helen Ivory | May 9, 2021 | Featured, Poetry
The Next Day I talk to pepper seedlings in their earthen pots, water their soil with gathered rain, tell them of the hope in their beginning I am the dark morning, edged with light. They tell me in Spanish of their home, talk of cool verandas and...
by Helen Ivory | May 8, 2021 | Featured, Poetry
clutch you catch her in the night a pale moon asking you her name in your sleep your eyes wander and she pinches you she cleanses old fires no need for a past to speak of she’s got some lipstick on her tooth or is that your blood? it’s...
by Helen Ivory | May 7, 2021 | Featured, Poetry
Eight days The kneewoman comes to lift him from the safety of his sac into the coffin we made to keep his sleeping form. I nurse him two days after the milk comes in. A week later I walk in gannet shoes, feet silenced by their leather, his jaw...