Ivy Ireland
Ivy Ireland is a part-time cabaret performer, creative writing tutor, harpist, magician’s assistant, and PhD candidate. Ivy was awarded the 2007 Australian Young Poet Fellowship, and has had her poems published in various literary magazines and anthologies. Ivy’s first solo poetry publication came out in 2007 and is entitled Incidental Complications.
L’escale Restaurant, Greenwich, CT
and it’s not like you have some other place to be. tea, open fire place, open fire on some other space for avoidance. it’s not like you are this ashes urn, portable picnic for later holocausts. or this charred log. you aren’t even the small burning before the final ash out. most other people come here to support themselves in whatever horror seems most appropriate in whichever day dream. of theirs. this day. why not you. this time. possibly they realise you won’t tip well even though lord knows desmond tutu ate here just last week. exclusivity should equal your absence. it’s not as though anyone can shape this differently to how they were born to shape it. there are no other tools, no contrasting fashions, no further instructions. what does equality really signify in any case. an afternoon of missing your morning of the subsequent day means little here. sunlight so new and distant, almost reaching the sand inlet before these clouds join forces to obfuscate it out.
The Gaps
The text has holes in it, little keyholes for the sake of myth-making, and only the one star-gazing out can (im)possibly slip into them. There is a crucial adjustment when “how can I exist?” turns into “how can I be alive in this?” Suddenly those roundabout machines we built to keep ourselves way out of critical theory converge in the centre, provoking and awakening an idea of onwards-and-upwards. This sensation is momentary.
Even if I say to you “you are this if this is life” it won’t matter and we will continue into cake at 3pm, our bodies refusing forever. Even if I sew in to my own skin the text: I do not require anything to continue this remaining, the stitches will only remain until they don’t anymore. And we’ll need them to stay there forever.
To perform becomes the central verb. Like the encroaching of the sea, we now perform this abeyance as though this temporary pause to consider could be stitched into skin, as though that very same skin could push its way through all the gaps the text could (im)possibly hold. As though, at the end, that same stinking vellum could be stretched over contingency like a disappearance-blanket. As though we could then hide away under it, remain in this word: love.