by Helen Ivory | Jul 16, 2020 | Featured, Poetry, Prose
Difference The two women cook together in the kitchen with the back door open. They swear and cackle about their boyfriends’ penises. When the sun gets lower in the sky they go out with their steaming plates and sit cross-legged on the tiny lawn...
by Helen Ivory | Jul 5, 2020 | Featured, Poetry, Prose
The Winter Coat My fingers flicked across the screen like a concert pianist performing a well-rehearsed and all too familiar musical score: odd numbers, one to thirteen, seventeen and twenty-seven (my lucky numbers), and a small bet on red, just...
by Helen Ivory | Jun 23, 2020 | Featured, Poetry, Prose
Why the river? Shannon sat in her tattered recliner chair and scowled at the cheesy infomercials on the television. It’d been exactly four years since the Mississippi River took her son Gus away. Gus was a freshman at the state university where he...
by Helen Ivory | Jun 6, 2020 | Featured, Poetry, Prose
An Escape In the back room’s desiccated atmosphere, the spiders stole one another’s shoes and sang their clever songs with their elbows folded. The shelf of hats stood to stiff attention, three coal black and a female in splendid blue that came...
by Helen Ivory | Jun 3, 2020 | Featured, Poetry, Prose
Charity shop crawl I start in Scope, find my first Kiss T-shirt from the Lick it Up tour, the old black now charcoal grey, a seven inch tongue lost to too much Persil. In Shelter, I find my leather jacket, purchased from an alternative clothing...
by Helen Ivory | Apr 28, 2020 | Featured, Poetry, Prose
Under Fire The job I needed. The job that contempted me. The job on a Loyalist housing estate in a blank end-terrace house, a crime scene smeared clean. The house impossible to hearten or heat. The job that started each day with lighting a fire...
