the poet
Shortlisted for The Broken Spine Chapbook Competition, nominated for The Pushcart Prize, and winner of the 2024 Black Bough Poetry chapbook contest, Helen Laycock has written five volumes of poetry. East Ridge Review made Frame their Book of the Month. Helen read a selection of poems from Elemental when she was a featured poet at a Welsh festival. Her other collections include Breathe, 13 and Rapture. Helen's poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including After…, Lucent Dreaming, The Storms Journal, Fevers of the Mind, The Winged Moon, Visual Verse, Frazzled Lit and Ink, Sweat & Tears.
the poems
Reconciliation
of Parts
At the dirtfall,
there is breathstilt.
The moon of my humerus
is disc-sliced,
as though cheesewire has
separated all but the core,
and the pain is pulled long …
a bitter stretch of ether projected
like a torch beam into a sinewy nightforest,
petering
into redshadow.
This snipped-string puppet limb
hangs
white
from a gibbet,
creaking and swinging
in the wind,
dwindled inanimate.
Hands are
as useless
as the grey hookbones
of mangled sparrow wings.
Fingerbacks flap,
asphyxiated fish,
ineffectively skimming
the reeds,
too late to hide.
Broken things are heavier
than whole –
burdens
purpose-weighted for
drowning,
glutted with thick silt dredged
from ragged seabeds
where dead things are buried,
and the black in the fissure
is not just a crack of colour but has
compacted
to coal.
Some fractures are
too dark
to be goldlit by Kintsugi.
Damage
will not succumb
to the numbness of slumber;
pain is synonymous with moonlight.
Sharp-edged metal stars
wedge
between incisors and
tongueblood is issued by the dishful,
weakening the flesh.
After motley bloom
and boneknit,
the illusion is
surface-perfect,
but where fire has burned
is an ashscar,
indelibly
black.
Wreckage rarely finds a harbour,
so dwells in the deepest places.
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Buckling
This stone has fossilised
behind my ribs, in symbiosis
with indented bonebridges,
griefmarrow-clogged,
heart abrading
with each waterlogged brushbeat.
This stone spurs
into the ringing trunk of my throat,
jagged promontories shredding
each branched breath, damming
plea, confession, release,
a snarl of splinters skewering
my tongue,
each swallow
shedding a clack of pebbles which
settle in extremities,
filling limbs with ballast.
Stilling me.
Toppling me.
This stone has embedded
its grit beneath my skin,
hot peppercorns of hurt pocking
at every slow move.
I sleep on pokers.
Grit-roughened sclera snag
on raked eyelids.
The slitted world is firebright;
I am curling in its flames.
This stone is carved
with your name,
and I will ferry it
until it sinks us
to mottle-flower
and rest,
unlit,
unburdened,
beneath a softmoss sky.
The Shape of Me
Beneath this skin,
I am trellised by crown shyness,
spindled by ethereal thickets,
curious root-taper
and apical tip-probe
burrowing distant contours
with sustenance.
I am forest.
Shoals of one-eyed fish ride
my current, darkeddying
the stripped hull where tides
begin,
rounding
skullboulder and bonebranch,
reeds brimful.
There is gold to be dredged.
I am river.
The brushing wings of wavesway are
deepcaved
until I listen;
the gush washes
the whorls of my shells.
I pucker beneath air.
Will discard furrowed driftwood.
I am ocean.
Interrupted lightning redforks
my firmament,
and nebulae gather
in weathered lungs,
stormcloud cording flesh.
Formed in a starforge,
elevated at death,
I am sky.
Publishing credits
All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb