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Annabelle Guetatra, Christina Chin/Uchechukwu Onyedikam, Myfanwy Williams, Richard Davidson

TAN-RENGA SEQUENCE: HINTERLANDER

Christina Chin/Uchechukwu Onyedikam

whistling ducks

rustling in the rushes

a swamp nymph

crumbles in a heap

at her feet

eerie marshes

the odour of red marigolds

mosquito repellent

discourages crawling

on the skin

tribes harvesting

hollow upright stems

ghosts light

raised battered hands

in supplication

Will-o'-the-Wisps

the deserted roadside stalls

handicrafts display

oiling rusted joint

of bittered emotions

gaudy

ethnic floor mats

ward off bog spirits

the diviner dusting off

sandalled feet

FRIEZE

Myfanwy Williams

Better to freeze. You learn stillness in this grey hinterland.

the multi-legged creatures simply curious. Monstrous

only in ballad. The beige downs gather the fading sun

and the boulders murmur their glacial tongue. Extinct

only as the clever man, only as Anansi. Somehow, they spool,

arachnid weavers, tensile silk elevated above. Moving

only upon this knitted thoroughfare. When the waters swell

towards the sky, so they rise, eight eyes speaking. Multiplied

only in urge. Only in tenor.

Better to still. Mother births upon the cavern sediment,

surrenders to their hunger; a hundred stories. Turned

only from thought to form. Out of the limestone fissures

narratives stumble. Your eyes adjust to movement. Learning

only from the loom, the yarning impulse to tether intersecting

arcs to patina with ground ochre and yolk. Tinctures

only of mineral and ore. After the flood, grandmother ferries

the living, teaching them spindle and loom. Nothing

only to paint form onto cave walls with egg yolk and ochre.

To be the still woman who paints on limestone entablature

only friezes, only poems collected from the earth’s surface,

she/you witness to/recorder of the narratives

only.

POEM FINDING BEYOND THE WHITE SPACE

Richard Davidson

start the collection from

the last poem

poems as friends hang from branches

flawed and wrought

some bring white noise

others drinking hawthorn

but there is one I leave

for you to find

beyond the dictionary definition

of unknowable

at the margins

sweeter than the fertile furrows

and like the storms

that come in fuller

than last year

felling the last deciduous.

Annabelle Guetatra has found that drawing has become her main obsession and an imperious necessity after several years of studies and experiences. She uses different forms: free paper, sheets assembled in a book, sound book, paper mache, ceramics, engraving, editing, self-publishing and animation. The drawn scenes invite us as to the show, give us to see mysterious but well incarnated bodies, thrown in some sorts of absurd mimodramas, rituals choreographies or other enigmatic dance steps. Scenes of love caught in flagrante delicto, where the characters are dressed with accessories, masks, strange vegetation, furniture or animals not really identifiable. This masquerade inspired by childhood stories, travels (sometimes dreamed), tells us about life, its desires, its anxieties, its magic and its strange cruelty.

Christina Chin is a painter and haiku poet from Malaysia. She is a four-time recipient of the top 100 in the mDAC Summit Contests, exhibited at the Palo Alto Art Center, California. 1st prize winner of the 34th Annual Cherry Blossom Sakura Festival 2020 Haiku Contest. 1st prize winner in the 8th Setouchi Matsuyama 2019 Photohaiku Contest. She has been published in numerous journals, multilingual journals, and anthologies, including Japan's prestigious monthly Haikukai Magazine.

Myfanwy Williams is a queer Filipino-Welsh writer based in Sydney, Australia. Her work explores social and environmental justice. Her poetry has been published by the South Coast Writers Centre, Writing Between the Fences, Plumwood Mountain Journal, About Place Journal, The Winged Moon Literary Journal and Querencia Press (Upcoming). Her first literary novel won a Harper Collins/Varuna Manuscript Development Award.

Richard Davidson writes about familial journeys, nature, and longing with an English palette. He hopes to engage the reader in his physically small poems with their profound inner worlds.