Featured Poet: Helen Ivory

Photo by Dave Gutteridge

Helen Ivory is a poet and visual artist. Her fifth Bloodaxe collection is The Anatomical Venus (May 2019). She edits the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears and is a tutor for the UEA/NCW online  creative writing programme. Fool’s World, a collaborative Tarot with Tom de Freston (Gatehouse Press), won the 2016 Saboteur Best Collaborative Work award. A book of mixed media poems Hear What the Moon Told Me appeared from KFS in 2016, and a chapbook Maps of the Abandoned City was published by SurVision Press (Ireland) earlier this year. She lives in Norwich with her husband, the poet Martin Figura. Her website is http://www.helenivory.co.uk/.

About The Anatomical Venus
An Anatomical Venus is an eighteenth-century anatomical wax sculpture of an idealized woman, a heady mix of eroticism, death and biological verisimilitude. Venus could be opened up and pulled apart by all the men that studied her. She would give up her secrets the first time of asking. The Anatomical Venus examines how women have been portrayed as ‘other’; as witches; as hysterics with wandering wombs and as beautiful corpses cast in wax, or on mortuary slabs in TV box sets. A hanged woman addresses the author of the Malleus Maleficarum, a woman diagnosed with ‘Housewife Psychosis’ recounts her dreams to Freud, and a sex robot has the ear of her keeper. The Anatomical Venus imagines the lives of women sketched in asylum notes and pictures others, shut inside cabinets of curiosity. You can read a poem from the collection below, and see further details about the book here. 


The Hanged Woman Addresses The Reverend Heinrich Kramer 

To conclude. All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.
Malleus Maleficarum  1486, Revs Kramer and Sprenger 

Do you cower in your crib at night
against encroaching evil tongues?
I picture you skittish inside your nightgown
as swollen tempests swoop upon your roof
and rattle the door you bolted thrice
against the dark invisible.

You said my womb knew such hunger
that I might devour a man entire.
Pray tell me in your clearest chapel voice
what tales they told you at the breast? 
A pretty Devil’s pact that would render
your creeping flesh delicious!

A sough of wind stirs papers on your desk.
You say women have weak memories,
then you shall be perplexed
that, despite my ruined body in the noose,
I recall each gnawing passage of your book.
When the sun awakens, they will cut me down.

Featured Poet: Kelli Allen

Kelli Allen’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the US and internationally. She has served as Poetry Editor for The Lindenwood Review and she directs River Styx’s Hungry Young Poets Series. She is currently a visiting professor of English Literature at Northeast Normal University in Changchun, China.

She is the recipient of the 2018 Magpie Award for Poetry. Her chapbook, Some Animals, won the 2016 Etchings Press Prize. Her chapbook, How We Disappear, won the 2016 Damfino Press award. Her full-length poetry collection, Otherwise, Soft White Ash, arrived from John Gosslee Books (2012) and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her collection, Imagine Not Drowning, was released by C&R Press in January 2017. Allen’s new collection, Banjo’s Inside Coyote, will arrive from C&R Press March, 2019. A poem from the new collection is featured below. Kelli's website is: www.kelli-allen.com

The tortoise shell maps every star 

No bull knows the thickness of its own rough horn. Some 

blue jays steal only the scarecrow’s left foot, and like us, 

he is left leaning too far against husks. There is a war

in the attic. Hounds’ jaws lining baseboards,

silk windless in every corner, hemming 

shut what we leave open each winter. 

Disregard bundled egrets. We know better

than to trust feathers or beaks in tessellation. 

The zodiac is a tablature you pocket for storms

at sea. When two calves are archboard painted,

the closest shore will never be to the east.  

I have flown the absentee pennant, not noticing

moth appetites until both sun and setting moon

cooed pinpricked lights across unfurled backstays. 

Barley and snakeroot in the same barrel means 

jealousy, indicates reluctant shepherds will gather

both at dusk and in the softer curl of virgin morning. 

Let’s not go on pretending that disquietude is anything

chaste. There are miles urged open past this undertow

and we swim steady, siphoning wind, aerialists in the salt. 

"Geology": A Poem by Tasha Beauchesne

Tasha Beauchesne is from the United States. She is entering the final year of university and is working towards a career in the publishing industry. She says of the poem "Geology" below that "it was the product of a deceptively simple prompt in a creative writing class: write about childhood. Memories of growing up with my childhood best friend in Massachusetts formed the basis for this poem."

Geology

The rock in your front yard was a boulder, 
an asteroid,
a remnant from when dinosaurs 
(or maybe aliens)
ruled the world.

Our heads bumping the sky,
we would survey the pavement,
swinging our bruised summer-sunned legs,
imagining we sat at the edge of the earth.

The evening August sun winked behind the mountains,
sparkling on the hood of your dad’s parked car,
lighting the scuffed wheels of our Razor scooters
lying haphazardly in the grass. 

We waited for the explorers and scientists
with flimsy brushes and microscopes 
to show up and declare our rock a wonder. 

With the six o’clock news glowing purple in your living room,
your mom called us back inside.