by Helen Ivory | Jun 16, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
Somewhere to get to The light is growing in the East the headlights skim the road that runs beside the flooded fields we’re a month off blossom when it comes I will drape myself in the year’s renewal and ask how many times I will see my little...
by Helen Ivory | Jun 15, 2024 | Featured, Prose
Fag Break A meek and graceful man dressed in a loose-fitting suit paces across the roof of the Four Seasons hotel. He smokes a cigarette and watches the Seoul skyline. He inhales. Beneath his skin, the smoke stains his lungs, thickens the blood....
by Helen Ivory | Jun 14, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
Coping strategies With the neon-splashed night at the window I counted each contraction down, obediently, as my mother had told me to do. Ninety-eight, ninety-seven… This instruction reminds me of my friend’s advice: if you’re ever in public and...
by Helen Ivory | Jun 13, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
You ask me why I put myself through that, as if I jumped out of a plane 14,000 feet of fear and longing. As if I were a camel pacing two-toed, unhindered into the eye of the needle. As if I plucked the thorn instead of the rose, wrist of scars no...
by Helen Ivory | Jun 12, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
The Circles on Your Ceiling You wake up (so you tell me) to the lurid gold of summer splashed like paint across your tea-brown walls; curlicues across your bed- room ceiling: complex, inter- locking circles (‘rings left by Goliath’s teacups upside...
by Helen Ivory | Jun 11, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
Fortuna rolls the dice in Tumahole Free State, South Africa I have never seen a baby so tiny outside a womb. You hold her jigsaw of bones in a blanket, afraid to scatter the pieces in case they’d sail like seeds onto the road. A dung beetle rolls...
