SurVision Magazine

Home-made

Miroslav Tichy


You hide a camera in a shoebox;
record darknesses
from the unheavened sky of yourself.

Negatives will spool about your feet
in the deep red glow
like too many eels.

And when they clean you from the streets
and pour out your pockets,
light will stain their hands like paint.





The Reformed Woman


Cleansed of height sickness
of bridges and church balconies
I can tiptoe like a well-schooled acrobat
on any vertiginous surface assigned to me.

Performing useful work in the laundry
has been a godsend in these smirched times.
My hands have never been so spotless
nor my soul so fair and orderly.

So much uniformed am I of menace,
(to think I was once nigh calcified!)
I will gather myself piece by shining piece
and fling me to the upmost spire.





Besom


that i might draw the moon down
to rest on my belly
a tarn of milk

that i might drink of her
and smear her blood
on my cheek

i hallow the besom with ointment
sky out to her nest
am bright with moon i

am song with her spirit
and i, she maiden mother biddy
          am loosed from my weight

birthed of our blood
red red roses, the belladonna
                              oh the night has silken fur






Helen Ivory is a poet and visual artist. She has won a Gregory Award and her fourth Bloodaxe Books collection, the semi-autobiographical Waiting for Bluebeard was short-listed for the East Anglian Book Awards (2014). She edits the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears and is tutor and Course Director for the UEA/Writers Centre Norwich online creative writing programme. Fool's World a collaborative Tarot with the artist Tom de Freston (Gatehouse Press) won the 2016 Saboteur Award for Best Collaborative Work. Hear What the Moon Told Me, book of collage/ mixed media/ acrylic painted poems, was published in 2016 by Knives Forks and Spoons Press. She was recently awarded an Arts Council grant to work The Anatomical Venus, her forthcoming collection from Bloodaxe Books.