by Helen Ivory | Mar 19, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
Seventy-one Things Paulie Should Know Farewell to the mountains, high-cover’d with snow, Farewell to the straths and green valleys below; Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods, Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods. My...
by Helen Ivory | Mar 18, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
A Bad Spell The rowan by the house is cracked in two, her bark ragged, grown good-for-nothing old. Fungi feed haphazardly and once, a treecreeper, his heart of white running like love on her trunk. A calligraphy of twigs marks wind-spun air, frail...
by Helen Ivory | Mar 17, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
Cousin I didn’t know who the call was about, just that it was past my proper bedtime on that surrogate school night, Sunday. I think the grownups had still been up because the landing light was lit for me and it would have been dark if they were...
by Helen Ivory | Mar 16, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
Islay: Your last holiday As he fixed scales in Port Askaig, paid in single malts and country charm, we loitered, impostors on an island farm. All at sea on a serenity of sheep, we played monopoly, box tatty and frail. Its missing chance cards, no...
by Helen Ivory | Mar 15, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
Bird of Prey Mami, I find myself wishing your memory were a bird of prey— red-tailed hawk or black vulture, just as long as the talons dig, long as edges curve into outstretched fingers. Oh to pierce through that final blur, I’d prize any...
by Helen Ivory | Mar 14, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
One Winter’s Line Between underpants and saggy bra, she hangs her fallopian tubes out to dry. They dangle like a pair of tan tights, dancer’s legs in the wind. She bends, reaches inside the basket, mistakes her vagina for an old sock. She...