Coexistence

Groping for the keys in your handbag, you notice the door is cracked open. There’s a particular smell coming out of the apartment. It’s pungent and painfully familiar. The aroma of failure and desperation. The air is heavy with the suffocating odor of dirty socks and boredom. You want to get away. The only resort you can afford is Drugville, Apathy, zip code-five big zeroes.

            Going in is never easy. There are piles of boxes on top of more boxes. Modern architecture on a dormant ground of buried demons. Furniture, electronics, crap, crap and beyond. Things you use for as long as the return policy allows. Get something, use it, return it, with the refund get something else, use it, return it and so on. The thing is it’s not as easy as it sounds. Nothing is. There’s a chart. Certain people, certain days, certain stores and then…rotate. Tanya produced it. The chart. She keeps track of the receipts, the deadlines and the rotation.

            You have all this fancy stuff poking out of your lifestyle. Not meant to fit in it.

            Boris is already gone. Everything else is very much the same. It’s a picture temporarily frozen in time. An ice sculpture on the beach. Your irreversible past entwined with your doomed future. Irra must’ve been looking for attention again. You can tell by the hospital jewelry around her wrists. You can tell by the blank nonchalant satisfaction in her eyes. The cigarette in her hand is the only thing burning. Katie Cleopatra is plucking hairs from his toes. You look at the silver toe ring and you think he must be happy now. Or at least at peace. Tanya is in the shower. You can hear the water running…she’s human after all. The door to her makeshift office, her sanctuary, is shut.

            You miss Boris now. Not in the way people miss other people. More like something’s been taken away from you. A piece of the only constant furniture around. Irra and Katie Cleopatra sitting on top of boxes. Not acknowledging the presence of one another. Not feeling obliged to.

            Tanya comes out of the bathroom trying to look tired or sick, or hung over. Trying to avoid answering questions. She turns her back on everyone and starts walking towards her room. Her wet hair leaving a trail of brunette drops on the floor.

            Groping for the keys in your handbag, you notice the door is cracked open.

Decomposed Reality

DECOMPOSED REALITY/published in The Chattahoochee Review/

Voice of Ice. Alta Ifland. Les Figues Press, 2007. 117 pp. $15.00.  

          Voice of Ice is an enthralling compilation of prose poems by Eastern European poet Alta Ifland. An experimental work documenting a fabled life built upon mutated dreams and amorphous manifestations, Ifland’s debut collection challenges its reader to question reality and consider an alternate, subconscious state of awareness. Voice of Ice creates a collage of distorted images, in which Ifland takes on a quest to extract reason out of the ostensibly absurd human existence, and as she penetrates her own psyche and strips away layers of accumulated ego, a tabula rasa emerges.

          In an effort to understand how words and language affect the constitution of an individual, the author composes her poems initially in French and then translates them into English. Originally from Eastern Europe, she foregoes the mother tongue and finds herself amid two new languages that disturb complacency and call her to engage in rediscovering and as she puts it, “renaming the world”. In this fashion, not unlike Samuel Beckett, the poet searches for an identity that is solely hers.

          Alta Ifland adeptly creates Voice of Ice as an enchanted vessel, in which she takes the reader on a surrealistic voyage from “Birth” to “Death”. The reiteration of images like eyes, bones, shadow, ice, and concepts like time, darkness, silence, soul amplifies the imminent realization of doom and temporality. Fragmentation is a technique used by Ifland, which generates bits and pieces that can be easily moved around. The author decomposes her body into essentials such as blood, tears and bone marrow only to give birth to a more pristine, purified creation, like the song of “a happy cadaver” in “Bones without a body”:

          My limbs are falling one by one. First one arm, then the other. My eyes are falling one by one. One eye, the other eye. My hair is falling bit by bit. From a distance, I watch my body shedding its leaves like a tree. …….And I’m dragging the bones the wind blows through, and my bones are singing like a happy cadaver.

          Morphing imagery plays a big role in the poet’s work. Real, recognizable objects construct dreamlike, incongruous landscapes. This strange combination of elements, for instance in the poem “Metallic Choir”: a “metallic spiral,” “church choir,” “waterfall curtain,” “swarm of bees,” and “white bones,” evokes a psychological response in the reader, both disquieting and haunting:

          At the end of the end of the world the end of a metallic spiral can be seen, coming from nowhere and stopping for no particular reason at this precise spot. If one pulls the end of the spiral, it triggers a sound like that of a child’s voice, singing on Sundays in a church choir. …..Their song, suspended for a moment in the air, and from there, coming back to earth, brings to mind a waterfall curtain. ….When the noise becomes unbearable, the children’s voices will themselves have become a swarm of bees attacking their fragile bodies, which they will gradually strip off their flesh, leaving only the white bones. …

          There is a perceptible softness about Ifland’s images that often disintegrate by spilling or dripping. The forms are phantom-like, elusive and unstable, as they easily morph into other unpredictable shapes. There is a striking resemblance between the eye Ifland illustrates in her “In the Night, a Dog” and the surrealist Salvador Dali’s painting The Eye. Both images appear soft and supple yielding to gravity “drop by drop into the unseeable.”

          An eye fills the whole night. A single eye, wide open. When it dilates, its edges extend beyond night’s boundaries, and then it falls drop by drop into the unseeable. …

          The poet dares to implicitly submit to life as it is. She chooses to dispose of her expectations, hopes, ambitions, judgments, and all the disappointment coming from them. A personal metamorphosis occurs and in the end, along with her acquiescence come humility and contentment. A good example of Ifland’s meekness is illustrated in “A louse”:

          I know I am but a louse lingering in corners and scrawling little louse stories meant to rot in the depths of the eye. … I lick the Masters’  boots and broken pots, and ask for forgiveness for being so little they can’t stop crushing me, and not a drop of blood falls when they do it. I am but a lame louse let loose.

          Voice of Ice is nothing short of an amazing literary work, both daring and mystical, with which Alta Ifland challenges the reader to engage in her quest for reason and resolution. This collection of orphic prose poems unlocks the gates to the boundless subconscious where abstraction becomes reality and verisimilitude loses its validity. The poet disputes the actuality of human scope and confronts primeval views and perceptions. It is an unconventional, distinctive piece of literature that undoubtedly deserves the public’s attention. 

Lost (a very short story)

I’m standing in front of a colossal, ornate gate; a white cherub on each side.  It’s an overwhelming feeling. To hear who you’re going to be.

I'm new. It’s my first time. A combination of random elements thrown together is what I am.

I'm auditioning for the part of a famous pop star. Leaning forward I press the button on the intercom; I tell them I have an appointment. Without warning the gate slowly starts to open. Blinding light is all I see. I can’t see.

I'm new. It’s my first time.

He is sitting behind a desk, looking distinguished…beard and all. On both sides of him respectively an older woman and a younger woman. The stage is infinite. By now I'm so used to the light, it feels completely natural. As natural as non-existent.

All I can think of right now is getting that role. It’s my only chance. Everyone’s entitled to one audition of their choice; failing to get the part means getting assigned another one. Not of your choice.

I float to the stage. He starts throwing scenarios at me; asks me what I’d do.

A unique arrangement of components in a mass production is what I am.

I know I did well. I can feel it. And then he says no.

That’s what I've been picturing as my life all along, being this pop star person. What am I supposed to do now? I'm lost in my own self.     

He tells me I'm too sensible to handle the fame that comes with the role. And I know this should feel like a compliment, but it doesn't. It actually hurts. He says it’d be too boring to watch. Emotionally unstable and dysfunctional combinations are suitable only. They never fail to fail; and that makes it interesting to follow. He announces I'm going to be a nanny.

I'm new. It’s my first time. And it’s not like I have a choice at all. I guess it’s my combination. But hey, it might be fun. And God says,’ NEXT.’

I start walking away from the X mark on the stage and he says, “By the way, you won’t be able to talk during your first 12 months or so. Until you forget. I can’t allow a leak you know.”

I wish it wasn't all predetermined. I wish I had a chance at this thing called life.

            

The Only Constant is Change...

So a few things have changed since I last blogged: I am now a mother, in my thirties and have finally let go of the lofty ambition of writing, replacing it with the humble, much more practical job in writing...CVs. Yes, I guess you could say I've settled for second best, but the way I see it I've just settled. Ambition is a relentless treadmill you need to keep up with. Never been a fan of working out anyway. I think I'll stick to walking, taking my time, taking small steps and sightseeing along the way. 
Things change with age anyway. You start seeing things differently. Growing up, I always wanted to be be like my dad: smart, erudite, resilient. But now being a wife and a mother, I've got a whole new respect for my mum, for all her daily mundane feats. I totally get it now, what she's been muttering under her breath for years, that a man could put a single nail in the wall and it would be there for the whole world to see, whereas a woman would cook and clean and do the washing up and yet there will never really be anything finished or completed, there'll always be more meals to cook, things to clean and loads to wash. 
On a very positive note, I have an absolutely adorable daughter who just turned 1 last week. She's staying with my mum and dad right now basking in grandparent attention and enjoying the tropical temperatures of my native Bulgaria, while here we've got our pants legs rolled up waiting for the floods to subside. 
On another positive note, my husband gave me the surprise of a lifetime and I got whisked away to Paris for my thirtieth birthday. It was a romantic, sunny weekend of which I will always think fondly. Plus now we can say we've added France to the fairly long list of countries where we've had good old McDonalds:-)