by Helen Ivory | Jan 2, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
Winter Commute I. I have not known how to shape This poem— I found it, drowsy, Quarter-to-six in winter In the cold of an unfinished floor And the cold of the tap And the cold of my pale extremities Exposed on all these fronts I found it in the...
by Kayleigh Jayshree | Jan 1, 2024 | Featured, Poetry, Twelve Days of Christmas
Weighing yourself in the dark at Christmas in your parents’ house You do not know how to weigh yourself at Christmas in your parents’ house, now it is no longer yours. You are used to standing naked each day in your flat with closed blinds. The...
by Kayleigh Jayshree | Dec 31, 2023 | Featured, Poetry, Twelve Days of Christmas
Knots When I remember the white paint of the door frame it’s not my tiny 8-year-old hands that grip it, steadying the spinning top of my chest. It’s not with those hands I feel the squeak of paint under fingertips, not with that thumb...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 30, 2023 | Featured, Poetry, Twelve Days of Christmas
Left Over Christmas Trees Paper never refuses ink, no matter how hard the words it just absorbs. In the same way the eye never refuses the blue of sky, the fish water, the bird never spurns air. In the wind leaves of eucalyptus show their silver...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 29, 2023 | Featured, Poetry, Twelve Days of Christmas
The Ninth Day It could have been any day—you in the doorway one hand in your pocket one still on the wheel the road: a fluster of birds your daughter: at one end lick- ing her wounds you at the other Lord of the Doorway—but it...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 28, 2023 | Featured, Poetry, Twelve Days of Christmas
Redbreast hawk-bait fool of a bird, top-branch, easy pick-off; careless busker; lonely crowd-pleaser, air-ruffled; one long itch and riff of song; leafless pitcher, head-turner, tuned in to tree-top maps of competitors; Mr Tomato-Soup-On-A-Stick,...
