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Hosking, Sandra
I am always drawn to places and non-human characters within those locales. I look for uniqueness and incongruity in spaces, something that makes an object stand out from its setting. Lines is a representation of the iconic Cable Bridge in Kennewick, Washington, USA, which has a personality all its own.
Karavatos, Nicholas
An expatriate since 2000, I began these poems freehand between returning from Ethiopia (2018) and leaving for Palestine (2020). I’d deleted my social media accounts and self-isolated pre-pandemic to refurbish my headspace furnishings with a rigorous writing practice as if I had a life to depend on it, and I did, so I emotively willed poems into being by writing. “Celtic Knot of White Denial” is from Colony Collapse, one of the two new manuscripts composed then. Considering my conceptually argumentative writing projects in I Believe in Blasphemy, the poetics of Colony Collapse is quite middle of the road in its lyricism, from where I stand. Another reader may stand elsewhere and hear it otherwise. Generally, the poems in Colony Collapse shape their lines from incoherency into unrhymed couplets as ways of cohering the words phrases sentences from a confusion to a fusion of con-foundations. “Celtic Knot of White Denial” speaks itself with narrative self-accounting.
Marrotta, Tom
I write of life’s most painful experiences. Pain of my childhood and young life. I write because I know pain. Pain that has scarred me. Pain that should not be on the written page. Pain buried deep within. Pain that should not have been experienced. Pain should not be easy to write about, but it is…. easier than all other things. To have a pleasant memory is to have a sensation, a yearning, for something that defies articulation. Pain cuts a deeper memory. It erases any significance to those events or experiences that the mind may also hold. This pain has brought me to my knees on more than one occasion; has caused me to believe that I simply need not continue. But I am still here. It is the uncompromising touch of death that has put a keener edge on my appreciation for life, that touch of death that came so often over the years. But now, I cannot be brought to my knees. Why does writing about the pain seem to be what I must do? Because I do what is necessary to convey what is essential to heal, and to have peace. Yes, I now have peace.