Ivy Alvarez

Bio: Ivy Alvarez is the author of Diaspora: Volume L (California: Paloma Press), The Everyday English Dictionary (London: Paekakariki Press), Disturbance (Wales: Seren) and Mortal. A MacDowell Colony Fellow, and a Hawthornden Fellow, her work is widely published and anthologised, including in Best Australian Poems (2009 and 2013), with several poems translated into Russian, Spanish, Japanese and Korean. Born in the Philippines and raised in Australia, she lived in Wales for almost a decade, before arriving in New Zealand in 2014. www.ivyalvarez.com

Bahay na bato

On Sunday, we return the keys
to the mausoleum in which I lived
a year in solitude watched over
by creatures of fur and feather,
chitinous arachnid
Cauterous memories collapsing
every time I touched them,
powdering to salt
What does time matter now
What did we learn
— our lesson?
Twenty-five years is a long
time to waver in and out
and we lived
with the vow like a sentence
of happily ever after
where after begins with the gate
swinging open the keys
forgotten and long behind us
and we remember how good
this tastes the flavour
of infinity


Filipino idiom meaning prison (literally, house of stone)

Bakbakan

we don’t really do this
or we didn’t not really
in the past we’d relied on silences
raised eyebrows frowns
a sigh and a pursed lip
acceding to what you needed
and the silences filled the blank
a cake layering of air
the nothing tasting of something
bitter perhaps all I know is
in the bedroom we exchanged
a look that said I changed
my mind that said I haven’t
the semaphore of our faces
quiet and frantic our bodies
furious at these plans we’d made


Filipino idiom meaning a fight; a serious quarrel (literally, when something is being removed or pulled off)

Roridula dentata

gummy glue-like clarity
with inflorescences depending
hairy pedicles waxing
axils of upper leaves

hapless attractants cluster to resin
a pantry of stuck comestibles
strewn on body aerating
to be picked by one in symbiosis
roaming with immunity to pluck and feed

defecate something nitrogenous for the leaves
pollinate and crawl and eat
in all the ways a plant cannot
create a self that exists without assistance
of some sort
to live

Byblis liniflora

I hard to tell if I am
who I say I am

do I feed on leavings
or the meat itself

it’s right for you
to doubt definitions

the dew on my body
only confuses

you’d call me beautiful
in the right light

yet my hunger
has such small teeth

you bandy my beauty
when it’s dangerous

my sessile glands
are warning and proof

I digest my prey slowly
dissolve every mouthful

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