TT Journal, ISSUE 7, September 2024

By Sylee Gore

A city burst its instant. Nettles change to lawn. Not frozen minutes but muscle of day. An hour more precious than any object. Time creates a story. We squeeze into the rain. I don’t raise my camera, not wishing to change the moment.  

A camera is not glue affixing time. Light’s ink invisible. Ephemera the better memory. Machines remember without us. Time as tide – stasis, then undertow. Why trust a photograph to write what words can’t? 

Lines become circles, circles flatten to lines. I use my breath to freeze the moment. Routine turns to ritual, ritual becomes routine. No sooner do I master an instant than it’s passed. 

I skim a book called sleep and set it aside. Look at this, by which I mean, look at everything. If we cannot record this moment, how to bear its loss? Silence vibrates in my mouth. The library at dusk. The playground at dawn. A palace in my mouth. In place of later, a constant now.  

Sylee Gore is an artist, researcher and writer and a member of the Expanded Librarian Text+Image research group at the University of Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. Her investigation of photopoetry was published as an illustrated folio in Bat City Review(University of Texas at Austin) and Kenyon Review recently featured two of her hybrid works. “A New Polyphony: Reinventing the Medieval Sestina” appears as part of Beyond Medieval Archives (King’s College London & York University). She has received awards for her writing from Queen Mary University of London, Northern Arizona University, and University of Oxford.