Enrique Martinez, Jonty Pennington-Twist, Sarah Cahalan, Robert Witmer

STILL; LIFE
Jonty Pennington-Twist
I’m sure that’s where you are
Painted in acrylic
Ankle deep
In snow that never meltsIn a place where
Animals go their separate ways
And bitter winds
Have taken with them
Any breathing space
I look for you, sometimes
Amongst the birches
That dream a life deciduous
By the stream
That cannot ever flow
And whilst my heart knows
I lost you to the hinterland
My imagination searches
All the same
PRINTER’S MARK
Sarah Cahalan
Dipped in tallow, a torch glows and gutters
amid shadows. The path meanders, sprawls,
narrows. Past the mouth, down a corridor,
you trail a finger on the wall.
Drafts thread themselves through fissures
in the rock, yarns from a distant skein.
In flicker-light, the stone is wax, and/or
the wet grooves and ridges of a mammal’s brain.
And smoke is what the air is now.
Breathe slowly, don’t panic, stay calm.
Follow a rhyme that tells you where to go,
which turns to take, when to crouch or crawl,
And ah, where to stop and look around, to sit.
Attention clears up any doubt.
Mix a slurry: water, ochre, spit.
With your mouth,
atomize a vapor of red clay.
It will stain the back of that hand, for days.
EAST OF EDEN
Robert Witmer
An empty wine bottle. A solitary rose. I glide across the kitchen floor with a glass of water.
Let us drink together, you and I. You with your bright red lips and thirsty thorns. Me with
what I believe you desire. A failing light darts through the torn curtain. A rickety chair at
your feet. There, where I suffer your long narrow neck. Cut from the garden. Where we lived
before time.
Enrique Martínez Celaya is an artist, author, and former scientist. His work is held in over sixty public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His notable projects and exhibitions include those at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia; The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.; the Museo Marino Marini in Florence, Italy; the Berliner Philharmonie in Berlin, Germany; the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, Cuba; and the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig in Germany.
Jonty Pennington-Twist lives and writes out of Edinburgh, Scotland, his work has been published in various anthologies, magazines and online platforms. He has been commissioned by the Royal National Lifeboat Institute and the RSPCA amongst others, and is currently in the process of finalising his first, full collection. His poetry tends to be a considered mix of straightforwardness (hinting at Northern English roots) and analogy. It almost always has a sense of melancholy. He likes to read the great Mary Oliver, Andrew Motion and Simon Armitage the most.
Sarah B. Cahalan (she/her) writes about natural history, hope/grief/faith, the layers of places and how those correspond with our layers as people moving through time and place. She has poems, current or forthcoming, in Dark Mountain, Stirring, Trampoline, and others. Sarah is from Massachusetts and is currently based in Dayton, Ohio (USA).
Robert Witmer has lived in Tokyo, Japan, for the past 45 years, where he served as a Professor of English at Sophia University until his retirement in 2022. His poems have appeared in many print and online journals. His first book of poems, Finding a Way, was published in 2016. A second book, Serendipity, a collection of prose poetry pieces and haiku sequences, was published in March 2023.