Biology, Geology

Dennis Goza

We scrabbled our way to the top

            of the boulder, and we stood

                        staring at the sheer cliff

                                    from which it had cleft, unfathomable

            forests ago.

We asked whether it happened like

            the crack of a whip, or like

                        the unwatchable growth

                                    of crystals in a glass, the blossoming

            of freckles on skin.

Had we been here, could we have been

            a part of the event, without

                        it being part of us?

How long would we have had

            to wait to catch another break, and how

                        would we find the fissure to watch?

                                    And would its impact

            repay our time?

We lop our inquiry short – parked

            in a restricted zone, we merely snatch

                        enticing pebbles and flick them, watching

                                    as they go skittering down the side

            and out of our sight.

Dennis Goza won his first prize for poetry at the age of 19. A playwright and actor as well as poet, he has been touring the U.S, since 1992, entertaining children and their adults. While a film critic and actor in San Francisco, he was involved in the founding of the San Francisco International Fringe Festival. He has written more than a dozen plays for the theatre company he co-founded, and has composed the music for many of the productions. His plays have been produced in festivals in Chicago, San Diego, Houston and North Carolina. His poetry has been published in Clockhouse, Gemini, Dime Show Review, River River, Waccamaw Journal, Barely South Review, The Finger, The Helix and Grand Little Things ; and he has published a volume of poems, Tortoise Dances.

Art: Dig by Ella Benami who is a visual Artist, based in London. Born in Israel in 1967. Ella is working primarily in Painting. She studied Fine Arts At the Corcoran College of Art and Design, Washington DC. She had been focusing on Abstract Painting from the beginning of her practice. Ella is also an independent Documentary Filmmaker, She received her MA in Documentary Film Practice from Brunel University in London. When Ella is asked to describe her paintings, she will say that her works gather around the desire to organise and create a certain kind of distinctiveness that can allude to systems of codes or symbols that seem to exist within structures of reality that are alternate to those we apprehend in our everyday lives. She describes her work process in painting as though she is somehow being transported into a non concrete terrain where she can examine a certain landscape from the inside. “Each time anew, I begin to create the particular environment from the language and material that this environment both demands and provides me.” Ella also mentions that the works do not intend to ask questions about creation or divinity, but that they certainly touch upon.