by Helen Ivory | Dec 30, 2022 | Featured, Twelve Days of Christmas
The Singing Ice Some stories tell the truth. Some stories lie. Make sure you can tell the difference. When the youngest sister killed the eldest for daring to be the one to inherit and court the man who should by rights have married the youngest...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 29, 2022 | Featured, Twelve Days of Christmas
A Star with a Star on Top This year’s tree has some kind of Viking heritage – you can smell sea on its breath and smoke in its hair. We managed to disarm it upon entering the house, after discovering three broad swords and a hammer hidden among...
by Kate Birch | Dec 28, 2022 | Twelve Days of Christmas, Word & Image
love symbols spoken in a chinese winter I am grown tall in the telling of the yellow that the dance leaves a signal for, finishing the ridge in a luminous squall, wanting your white elk-breath and the hoof-pound at my door. I am the first blade turned black in winter...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 28, 2022 | Featured, Twelve Days of Christmas
Christmas 1978 We didn’t ask him to play dead. His record was three days. But we kicked each other over like he’d told us then cleared the battlefield. We spied his advance, inch by inch, the big shoe dragging, polished beneath a sharp crease....
by Helen Ivory | Dec 27, 2022 | Featured, Twelve Days of Christmas
The Angel Gabriel Visits Mary in Bedlam (Ecce Ancilla Domini!) After Dante Gabriel Rossetti look at the dove so wide a suicide against the wall wrap it up in the blue cloth I’ve been keeping it unwrinkled for such a purpose long blue...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 26, 2022 | Featured, Twelve Days of Christmas
Christmas is the end of the world It took some adjusting but we’re looking forward to it now. Next door have hung the bunting out, lines and lines of LOVE and PEACE which would have cost the earth until we realised there was no point in money any...
