IVOIRE is a Southern siren cultivated in New Orleans, a preternatural place of ruthless juxtapositions, haunting beauty, the crueler harmonies of nature, an intoxicating opulence and decay. She is the Southern Gothic superlative, languid and sultry, tony and louche, a crepuscular enchantment cloaked in Southern politesse and grace in the gloaming. For the contemplative, she is alchemical. Unlike tourism that reaches outward into the world, the pilgrimage to New Orleans is an inward movement, a return to the center. Arrive at her door at a gallop; the indelible humidity washes over in a baptismal wave—a rite of passage as gallop slows to saunter, the gait of her dream. She is atemporal and cuspate, a threshold space where numinous and phenomenal converge. A mist of enchantment hangs over the city that resists evaporation under the scorching gaze of the rationalist eye. Unburdened by disenchantment beyond her borders, sundry specters stroll with witches, dark flowers, decadents, and sybarites in the cult of the arcane. New Orleans is the gamut of experiential intensity. She is an olfactory orgy, where heady star jasmine and Southern magnolia collide riotously with fetid fevers of bitterness and lunacy. She is a vivid parade of resplendent peacockery and the rich hues of autumnal decline, of overripe fruit. She possesses a predilection for embellishment, with an embroidered language all her own and an aggregate rhythm that drives the processional pulse of the city. Predatorial extremes of nature bear down upon the place and confer a poignancy and granular appreciation of her experience—a sense of memento mori. Hers is a culture that dances with death. She is simultaneously the last breath of an exhausted idyll and a site of exquisite refinement. The Queen of the South is a languorous old hedonist and a crucible of transformation. We who hear her song are bound to her by the heavy, atmospheric weight of her spell, bewitched, as the quotidian beyond her threshold ever after registers as anodyne and anemic.