Helen Ivory [UK]

 

Streets of the Abandoned City
 
The Street of the Candlemaker runs slant to the river
where time is detained in slight tallow bodies,
moored up in ragboats awaiting the tide.
 
The Street of the Illusionist was never there,
or so it would have you believe;
an empty black bag in a vat full of pitch.
 
The Street of the Graveyard is lined with books,
with symbols and scorings no one can decipher
and carvings of cherubs too weighty to fly.
 
The Street of the Birds is a vault of locked cages,
each inhabitant rendered to feather and bone.
Wind blusters through keyholes to parody song.
 
The Street of the Kings wears a crown of eye teeth
plucked from the jaws of anonymous dogs.
The Street of the Dogs was scratched from the map.
 
 
 
Sleep
 
The city is old.
It pulls furs about itself,
hunkers down and draws archetypes 
on the insides of its eyelids with chalk:
 
a staircase stopping to consider
if it is going up or down,
a bed empty as a ploughed field,
a discarded sheet miming snow.
 
These days there is nothing
you can say to bestir the city.
No seraphim or hooded minstrel
to pour music through its underground trains.
 
 
 
The Tales
 
                           *

The maid stood at the edge of the city and opened the cage of her chest.  Her heart preened its wings of arterial blood and then flew.  Up it went, high, high as the cathedral spire.  She returned to the palace and made beds, tight as drums.

                          *

One morning, when the cloak-maker had finished a long night of stitching, his fingers aching, the fabric spotted with his own blood, he sat in the stillness and observed his labours.   Even the sun was not stout enough to penetrate the deep valleys of the cloak.  

                          *

What use is a head? thought the gardener as he scythed off his own and those of his groundsmen.  The heads rolled into the palace’s ha-ha.  Bees were occupied like any other day.  A mole mined a path under the neatly rolled lawn. 
 

(from “Maps of the Abandoned City”, SurVision 2019)
 
 
 
 
Author’s Bionote:
 
*Helen Ivory lives in Norwich, England. She is a poet and visual artist who makes shadowboxes, needle felted creatures and collage. She is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award and was awarded a Cholmondeley Award by the Society of Authors in 2024. She edits “Ink Sweat & Tears” and teaches and mentors for The Poetry School, Arvon and The National Centre for Writing. A poem from her surrealist chapbook “Maps of the Abandoned City” (SurVision 2019) is one of the Poems on the Underground. She has work translated into Polish, Ukrainian, Croatian, Spanish and Greek as part of the Versopolis European poetry platform.  Her “Wunderkammer: New and Selected Poems” appeared from MadHat in the US in 2023. “Constructing a Witch” (October 2024) her sixth collection with Bloodaxe Books.  It was a PBS Winter Recommendation was translated into Greek and published in Greece by Thraka in 2025. She has just been awarded an Authors Foundation Grant to work on “Elfshot”, her new collection for Bloodaxe.
 
 
(Photo by Martin Figura)