The Immovable Stance by Helen Ivory

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A Note from the Editor:

Here, we see how memory lands like a backfist. The Immovable Stance offers no neat redemption arc, only the weight of a father's words and the off-kilter balance of inherited harm. Shotokan Karate’s fudo-dachi becomes more than a posture here: it’s the grim theatre of masculinity, of who gets to stay rooted and who is scattered. But it’s also about patriarchal unravelling, and how badness echoes through again and again.

– Max Wallis

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The Immovable Stance

by Helen Ivory | poet | artist

Shotokan Karate: fudo-dachi You'd taken my father to the pub and got him drunk on JD. He was saying how you reminded him of his father and how he could do karate. He told you l'd always been a slag. He used to drive my sister to karate and watch from the side of the hall. A slag is a coarse or dissipated girl or woman; dissipation means to scatter in various directions; disperse; dispel, and in the same dictionary it says that a parent is a protector or guardian. I can't help but jump in and speak up for my twenty-two-year-old self; I'd been in what, three relationships? My abiding memory of him is in your kitchen doing a boozed-up version of the Immovable stance.

Helen Ivory is a poet and visual artist. She edits IS&T and teaches for Arvon. Her six Bloodaxe collections include Waiting for Bluebeard, which centres on domestic abuse, and Constructing a Witch (2024), which is a PBS Winter Recommendation. She won a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2024.

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