Mega*Zine Lost&Found #21/2017 ENG

#21 ENG Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

Mega*Zine Lost & Found # 21/2017 CHANGE TABLE OF CONTENT: 003_ INTRODUCTION 004_ POETRY — Dymna Kruk 005_ GALLERY — Yuri Soba 013_ INSPIRATIONS — Interview with Agnieszka Płoszaj 031_ GALLERY — Grażyna Ambrożek 048_ PROSE — Ada Filimonowicz 060_ GALLERY — Helena Rajska 067_ POETRY — Ewa Jakubek 068_ INSPIRATIONS — Interview with Aleksandra Hońko 075_ PROSE — Istvan Vizvary 088_ GALLERY — Elena Baila Albrizzi 099_ POETRY — Jan Siwmir 100_ GALLERY — Aga Jot 105_ POETRY — Piotr Strumyk Stróżyk 106_ PROSE — Arek Spiewak 108_ GALLERY — Anita Włodarczyk 125_ POETRY — Zdzisława Górska 126_ GALLERY — Katarzyna Radzka 134_ INSPIRATIONS — Interview with Maria Nowakowska 149_ PROSE — Anna Grzanek 157_ GALLERY — Adam Topolski 172_ POETRY — Magdalena Zawadzka 173_ GALLERY — Katarzyna Szyszko 181_ TOSSING MEATHOOD — Łukasz Ociepa 186_ GALLERY — Szymon Jobkiewicz 216_ PROSE — Damian Bralewski 222_ GALLERY — Marta Łącka and Beata Michalczyk 233_ POETRY — Damian Dawid Nowak 234_ GALLERY — Anna O Hollins 243_ INVITATION TO NEXT ISSUES

On the cover: part of a painting

by Helena Rajska entitled „Portrait of a husband”

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Mega*Zine Lost & Found # 21/2017 — CHANGE — INRODUCTION What changes and what does not change at all? Do you like changes? Why so? Why not? What kind of changes make you sad, angry, upset, happy, powerless or just full of new strength and willingness to act? Are changes important? What changes do you assess best, and which ones worst? Who are you after the changes? Who were you before them? Is "change" a good philosophical topic? What else can you say about "the change"? Interpretation (as always) belongs to you.

We can change. We can start changes. We can finally resist them, naively believing that not everything has to change, that things are unchangeable in the world. However, we will have time to fight next year...

We are currently changing. Introduction lands at the beginning. The inside of L&F is evolving.

There is a new section with conversations and plant-based recipes (TOSSING MEATHOOD / RZUCAM MIĘSKOŚĆ), which is supposed to support changes — this project was to be implemented separately, but then it would never see the light of day, with L&F it can grow. We hope you will welcome it warmly, although it may violate your conviction about the only and right way of life. In this issue there are more conversations with people who became my inspiration while creating this "the change”. So there are different points of view. Further changes can be expected soon.

The team remained unchanged. However, if you feel that you would like to do something and work for the idea — our doors are always open. We are ready for such changes...

We would like to remind you that recruitment to the fairytale issue (22/2018) currently takes place.

Information on all current calls and dates of sending materials is always on our website and in the events created at FB, which are at the end of the issue.

Thank you for being with us and we are counting on you being happy with us, seeing the next issue of Lost. Łucja Lange TEAM: Łucja Lange (editor chief) Piotr Kasperowicz (poetry section editor) Edward Lowczowski (English proof-reading) Zofia Piwowarska (English translations) Mega*Zine Lost&Found Dagmara *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** Maslej (Polish proof-reading)

ISSN 2391-4742

POETRY edit. by P. Kasperowicz

Dymna Kruk

in the new - at the sowing season, I am in malachite loneliness with grated rosemary in the leaky pocket of an old coat you left a trail of his dried needles in the thick aroma of love and I felt the power of the Slavic community - I call us the Beginning I will not waste any of your glances because I do not need to speak anymore in the new - at the sowing season, I am in malachite loneliness with a lemon between dawn and the approaching season of cleansing rain by accepting the gift, I felt how we create the code of our legend in silver-gray armor I can feel pulsating breasts fighting for space and swallowed seeds of wild rose have a taste that I do not have to remember I'm a spider's thread now all I can do is trust the winds...

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GALLERY

Yuri Soba

We are mutable beings, accompanied by mutable thoughts, passions and emotions but we aspire and we are always accompanied by desire for eternity even if our physicality is ephemeral but not ever changeable as our thoughts.

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GALLERY

Yuri Soba

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GALLERY

Yuri Soba

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GALLERY

Yuri Soba

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GALLERY

Yuri Soba

Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

GALLERY

Yuri Soba

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GALLERY

Yuri Soba

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GALLERY

Yuri Soba

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INSPIRATIONS

Agnieszka Płoszaj

Her debut book appeared early this year. A crime story with the mysterious title “Czarodziejka”. I found her website and a report of a meeting in some library – she seemed a likeable person, quite strong and smiling. When interviews with her and reviews of the book appeared online, I thought I would like to hear her speak out, dispel some of the usual myths. And I decided to invite Agnieszka Płoszaj for a chat. Our meeting started with an anecdote about her readers and how the perception of oneself changes through the prism of other peoples’ behaviour. And it ended with an anecdote about the changing perception of what is normal and acceptable. I invite you to read the interview.

Agnieszka Płoszaj: I found myself in the following situation at the Fairs in Warsaw. At the end of the day, a lady came up to me. She wrote down a book title and said she’d come to buy that book. And the girls tell her – oh, you’re lucky because Agnieszka is still here. And they started looking for me, but I was already in the backyard. And my daughter comes and says: mom, there’s a lady and the cashiers want to know if you can come to see her. I thought: “Sure I will”. I took some muffins from the exhibition we had prepared and went to meet the lady. When she saw me, she’d come there with her daughter too, she grabbed the child by her hand and said: “Look, look, there’s that

lady…”. Tears and screams. I was surprised.

I told her to calm down, that I would sign everything, no problem at all. A surprising and funny situation. I said to my husband: “You know what? It was worth travelling two hundred kilometres if only for that one person, for that smile”. An incredible reaction. For me it was a totally new experience. Maybe famous people get used to that names and they wouldn’t pay

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INSPIRATIONS any attention. For me it was a surprise – and a very nice one too.

L&F: At the beginning they pay attention. I feel that becoming a well-known person is surprising and requires a change in the way you perceive yourself. We seem to be the same but something has changed and will never be as it used to be earlier. This is where we touch upon the issue title “Change”. In your case this appears in many areas: a change or extension of professional profile – you’re starting to show your writing to the public rather than hide it in the closet…

Agnieszka Płoszaj: I compare it to using a handbrake on the motorway because you make a full turn. A moment of confusion and suddenly you’re involved in things that have earlier been linked to an elite group of people.

Usually from newspaper covers. I am not someone who jumps at the idea of being famous… I am only sitting here and watching – what has actually happened that I find myself here? And does it really change anything?

L&F: On the one hand, nothing changes but there are people who think that it’s good to have connections.

Agnieszka Płoszaj: I always say it’s better to know one person too many than one too few.

You never know what’s ahead of you, who you will come across on the way. That’s why I don’t reject people and I don’t discredit new acquaintances. I like people. I enjoy talking to them, laughing. Against all appearances, I am rather withdrawn. I keep my distance from people. The distance can be adjusted but it’s up to me to decide when it needs adjustment.

Agnieszka Płoszaj I really have few people near me. And that’s enough for me. I know who and what I can count on. And coming back to the “well-known people”… Yes, it feels nice. Sometimes funny.

But I go back home to my work.

L&F: Yes – your work. The thing that really surprises me and appears in just about every interview with you I’ve seen: your works consist of changing images. You offer advice relating to changes to others. You have the change inscribed…

Agnieszka Płoszaj: In me...

L&F: Exactly. So you have been facing change from the very beginning. Additionally, I’ve found information about workshops for younger people Agnieszka Płoszaj: Yes, these are hairstyling workshops, related to my profession…

L&F: This means that you also implement changes (in the manner of perception) as an educator. The issue of education made me think when reading your book. You’re trying to teach us something by touching on such a powerful topic? What was your inspiration?

The book touches on the story of Anna Maria Herbst and I wonder if there is any story that moved you as a mother to deal with the problem of child kidnapping?

Agnieszka Płoszaj: Regarding the problem of child abduction, I focus more on the motif of changing the world. About whether it’s good to take somebody out of their spoilt environment and move them to an idyllic life. Is it meaningful and necessary?

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INSPIRATIONS L&F: But still you have not answered…

Agnieszka Płoszaj: No, no, no… I leave it to the reader (laughter). I thought that if it was great, than there would be more instances of disappearance. I did not want to take any risk.

There are too many kidnappings anyway. That’s why I won’t comment on this issue – I’ll let everybody decide for themselves. It was the first idea about such changes. And the second

Agnieszka Płoszaj one was linked to the disappearance of a girl in the 1980s, near the Central shopping mall [a signature shopping mall in Łódź located in the city centre at the intersection of Piotrkowska Street and Piłsudskiego Alley – Ł. L.] – I don’t remember exactly. She went out and never came back. She was lost. Somebody told me that story and it stayed inside me with various d e t a i l s . L a t e r, t h e r e w a s t h e c h i l d disappearance situation in general – there are many such cases these days. You hear that a child was found at the very last moment, when it was already dressed up and got a new haircut… Or that a child was never recovered.

Things like that. But what was related to me personally in the whole story regarding “Czarodziejka” was the story and the arrangement with Mania.

L&F: I wanted to ask about it. At one of the authorial meetings, you admitted that Julka was your alter ego. Whose alter ego is Mania? Is it a specific person or a combination of various features of different people? Or maybe a fictitious character?

Agnieszka Płoszaj: Let me put it like this, Mania is a copy of a living person. This girl currently lives abroad. Unfortunately, she got into trouble because of her imprudence and her…, well, naivety. And she had to flee. She stayed there for good and all this is definitely outside her reality now. She has started a new life and she is going fine. But there was a moment when we were friends here in Poland. Everybody was surprised that it was possible, that we were so different but managed to get on well with each other. She always made me laugh. The atmosphere was always so relaxed at her place. Many people came

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INSPIRATIONS

Agnieszka Płoszaj

there. It was an open house. I enjoyed staying there. So this is real – this relationship.

you’re a woman, you must cook and love shoes…not cars.

L&F: I sense that car expertise is real too?

Agnieszka Płoszaj: Exactly. A sweet idiot or an smart ass. Two dominant patterns (laughter).

Agnieszka Płoszaj: Well, yes. This is my weakness. Cars are my weakness just like coffee is my weakness. I must admit it. It’s visible any time and any place.

L&F: And this is another thing that foretells changes – something that breaks stereotypes and makes people change their perception of others. You are a hairdresser who likes cars…

So there is something feminine and masculine in one person. But earlier conversations with you focused on how it happened that a hairdresser wrote a book…

Agnieszka Płoszaj: Oh, yes. I hate this question but I realise it is a surprise for many and it can be problematic for some…

L&F: But is shouldn’t be. In the past, the best story-tellers were those who had their own experience in the matter, not necessarily the educated ones. It is good to see people not through the prism of false convictions.

Agnieszka Płoszaj: I knew it would be the main question. But I assumed that one day new questions would appear.

L&F: I hope it will be like that because staying with sketchy information, the reader will never get a chance to get to know you. He or she will remain at the stage of general slogans and stereotypes – if she is pretty, then she must be stupid. If she’s a blonde, she must wear tips. If

L&F: When I was reading your book, I noted the appearance of the fifth woman. Each of them was slim…

Agnieszka Płoszaj: No, Madzia is not slim.

L&F: Madzia appears later. But at the beginning, in the first part, we only meet slim ladies. There is no “normal” woman, they are all on diet… It was saddened by it.

Agnieszka Płoszaj: But this results from the fact that they are really like this. While writing I found myself surprised by the fact that they’re all good-looking.

L&F: And even policemen are handsome. But one has to admit that this is the first book in which I’ve read about the character ’s appearance and all the cosmetic routines they pursue and I feel that the authoress knows what she is writing about. It finally makes sense and at the same time, it’s all natural, not artificial.

You know, often people write that the character had a shower and used some shampoo but we don’t learn anything more – maybe except for American books with product placement.

Agnieszka Płoszaj: I also often find it funny when somebody starts the subject but doesn’t develop it.

L&F: Yes, yes, and one of the policemen uses matte gum – so this is very fresh and well

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INSPIRATIONS thought out. Finally, somebody is showing in detail the daily life of people and describes their morning beauty routines. For me this is a big change. Characters gain authenticity. And I wonder if the issues relating to beauty and cars are so carefully reflected, where did you get the inspiration for the florist’s which is also “life-like”?

Agnieszka Płoszaj: Regarding the florist’s, the idea was that I did not want the plot to be set at the hairdresser’s because I did not feel comfortable with it. Hairdresser’s in the book, hairdresser’s in real life…

L&F: But you know that your hair salon would become an icon that features in a book!

Agnieszka Płoszaj: Probably yes. But I wanted to have the florist’s in the same place because I always wanted to have the florist. And somehow I subconsciously realized this idea in my writing. I was always fascinated by such places. I always wanted to run one. And I cannot promise I never will. I admit that I have a soft spot for such places. For the coffee drinking culture… the ritual of its preparation, etc. We were in Italy not so long ago. I did not do anything else there apart from running from one place to another and drinking coffee.

A brought bags full of coffee… as if there was not enough of it here (laughter). When cleaning the hair salon with one of my assistants, I started to change things and move furniture.

And she, knowing what we were heading for, said: “Agnieszka, this is a hair salon not a coffee place”. So obviously I am still tempted.

The idea to set the plot in a coffee shop came as no surprise. As for the whole system of operating the coffee place, there is one

Agnieszka Płoszaj befriended cafeteria near my salon that I visit basically every day. My friends work there and it is not a problem to watch them work or consult some things. Although I didn’t have to do it now, observation itself says a lot. That’s where I got the idea of a coffee place. But the Bomboni Café from the book is located in my salon.

There is a scene at the end of “Czarodziejka” were the girls go the salon, to the hairdresser, to change Julka because they both were naughty… This is the scene (I even wondered if the editor would not remove it because it was so loosely tied to the plot) where I included two things. First: Julka changes her dark image but does not change her nature. She becomes a blonde, but this doesn’t mean she’s softer now or that she stopped doing some things…

L&F: It can be read in a number of ways.

Finally, the blonde lets her feelings speak only in the end.

Agnieszka Płoszaj: Yes, yes, but in the second part it is more visible that there is a pain in her and it will show. Her powerful personality… there’s no way to deal with it. Secondly, Julka suddenly meets the salon owner. This is an instant when they see each other and exchange two sentences. And Julka leaves feeling they know each other. This is a clash of time and space.

L&F: Alter ego meets the same person.

Agnieszka Płoszaj: Yes, exactly something like that.

L&F: In one of the interviews you said that the city of Łódź is not the heroine of your book but a setting. One the one hand, that is true. What

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INSPIRATIONS I really like was that Łódź was shown not from the side we all know: Bałuty, Śródmieście, Księży Młyn or Polesie [districts in Łódź – Ł. L.].

No, we have Janów here. We learn that the heroine drives by the Dell factory, so the factory is placed on the map. Such locations are very, very typical of Łódź in the sense that they are clearly identifiable for us. They are inscribed on mental maps of this city.

Agnieszka Płoszaj funny. There are many such descriptions and nuances which can be grasped only by local people but I think they help strangers get to know our city. These essential details build up the atmosphere. You can see that at the very beginning when an old lady gets a letter – the way she opens it, the envelope, the handwriting, you can almost see it when reading the book. On the one hand, it is great

Agnieszka Płoszaj: I try to distance myself from Bałuty. I don’t want it. I want Górna, Śródmieście, Widzew… I go in that direction.

I can also say that in the second part there is much more of Łódź as a place. The editor advised me to include more of it. Thanks to him, I added fragments related to Łódź.

L&F: We usually say that our city if grey but I do feel that Łódź has never been grey at all.

Agnieszka Płoszaj: It’s not grey and I hope I presented it that way. The third part is set in Księży Młyn and I clearly describe this location – the victim is placed in a pond (laughter), I allude to the Herbst Palace, to the loft buildings. In the second part, there is something about Bałuty (laughter). I mean there is Park Śledzia mentioned [a common name of Staromiejski park – Ł. L.]. and the victim.

L&F: I liked it that you noted that the Magda building [former shopping mall at the corner of Piotrkowska and Jaracza streets] once hosted McDonalds’s and now there is a food store.

I feel that few people notice such changes and in the case of Łódź, they are kind of the city’s essence. So you have captured the change.

And there is also the problem of the factory owners’ monument and city monitoring – very Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

INSPIRATIONS

Agnieszka Płoszaj

but on the first page I feared that you might use lengthy descriptions that I would like to avoid (laughter). I am happy it did not happen, that the book follows the same rhythm and you can read it smoothly.

out and immediately there appears a book about princes and princesses. I was wondering how he read the book, since the first scene involves a boy? The first, basic issue that finally turns out to be essential.

Agnieszka Płoszaj: I wanted the book to be comprehensible. When I read, I don’t like the book to have too many descriptions. I skip them. Everybody does it I guess. Nobody reads them. People prefer dialogues instead.

L&F: Because it has to be said that the story is not an open-ended one.

Agnieszka Płoszaj: So I don’t know how he read it if he doesn’t even know who appears in the first scene…

L&F: So how did you manage to include micro descriptions that still allow us to see the place, to define it in a way that is not boring. And I will return to the Dell factory. I really don’t know why Łódź is often depicted as a post-industrial city, full of vagabonds, skin hunters, children drowned in barrels, pathology, enclaves of poverty. But we also have new factories, foreign investment that has for years helped to shape the city image: there is the Dell plant, Indesit, Bosch, Gillette. There are many such places and it’s only thanks to them that other places can survive because the citizens work in these factories. You don’t need to see human exploitation only. It creates a false image when you neglect such things. That is why I am happy you have managed to present such picture of Łódź that I can identify with and I think many readers will feel the same. And since we’re talking about reading and reception of your book, how did you cope with its reception – I’m talking about the people who wrote their reviews of your book but, in my opinion, did not get it at all.

L&F: Maybe he started from the second chapter? There is a girl there, right?

Agnieszka Płoszaj: What really made me laugh, but with irritation, was some man who wrote that a girl got lost, somebody kicked her

Agnieszka Płoszaj: Yes, there is a girl in some flashback but I don’t think he paid any attention to it. He just browsed through it…

L&F: I read a review which informed me it was not a crime story but a social tale…

Agnieszka Płoszaj: ...with a criminal thread.

L&F: Exactly.

Agnieszka Płoszaj: The reviews are written by accidental people, bloggers who work for various publishers.

L&F: But that review was written by a novelist.

Yet I have to admit that in the end I was not sure if he was praising the book or not because the grammar and logic did not work well in that text. It encouraged me to read the book but it is difficult to extract his opinion. And thus my question – how to avoid losing your mind when you get something so distorted? Because it is irritating that somebody reads what I write in

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INSPIRATIONS a limited way, without any comprehension, and they draw strange conclusions.

Agnieszka Płoszaj: That people in their 20s must study rather than run their own business?

L&F: Yes, that too. This comment was strikingly unrealistic for me.

Agnieszka Płoszaj: I am living proof that you can start your own business without any credit, using only your own money. I started my company in 2005, without any grants, because there were hardly any grants available at that time and they were only accessible for very few.

L&F: That is why I am surprised that somebody can be so unfamiliar with the problem and have no knowledge of people. They apparently know only one social group on which they comment and they don’t do that well.

Agnieszka Płoszaj: I was 24 when I opened my salon. The same age as my characters.

I did not have well-off parents. The only money I had was the money I had earned through hard work. I followed the rule: either I lose everything but will stay debt-free, or I will somehow manage. This was my priority when I left a prosperous salon. I earned good money there. I liked that work and I think they also enjoyed working with me but one day I felt tired and something had to…change (laughter).

I was driving when I thought that it was the right moment. I remember I calculated everything, what I could afford, how I could use the money I had… And it turned out it was feasible. Maybe the equipment would not be top quality, branded, modern and brand new, but I would be independent and I would start building my own

Agnieszka Płoszaj brand. And actually things were easy at the beginning. I had no debts. It was the most important thing for me that I was starting without any credit to pay. I was starting with nothing. After the first year, it turned out I was winning new clients and the salon grew.

I remember the first premises of 30 square metres. Now I use more than 100 square metres in the city centre, with all beautician services, everything you need. So there is progress, I have made it. It is not impossible.

But you have to do everything in an reasonable manner, knowing that you cannot risk too much, you have to keep a clear head and if it starts to go wrong, you have to accept failure. But you must also know we have worked hard for this success. Not only me but also my husband.

When the children appeared, I took only two weeks off. My husband took over some of my d u t i e s . We e s t a b l i s h e d a s y s t e m f o r cooperation. I had a corner for children in the salon so my children basically grew up there.

There were no days off, no fooling around. It was hard work.

L&F: When did you start writing?

Agnieszka Płoszaj: I wrote a lot at school. In the secondary school, because I went to a secondary school, I wrote a lot. My graduation paper was eight or ten pages long because I ran out of paper and time…But not of ideas.

That’s how it was. Later I wrote little. It happened that I wrote something but nothing serious. But I always remembered not to forget to write about what happened with my “Mania”.

And I knew I had to write it down because otherwise the all these events would be wasted – and they were too funny to lose them. I once tried to write about it but my youngest daughter

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INSPIRATIONS

Agnieszka Płoszaj L&F: How do they like it that their mother is now a celebrity?

Agnieszka Płoszaj: Oh, dear. A celebrity (laughter). I hate this term. But well… they like it a lot. They even asked me, which is quite funny but also big-headed… But before the book was published, my younger daughter had asked me if I’d be famous. And I replied and I didn’t know because you can never expect that. Nobody can promise me that so I cannot make any promises either. She was slightly confused and said: “Damn it, I have already told my teacher at school…” (laughter).

L&F: So I had to make it happen...

Agnieszka Płoszaj: On the whole, they’re happy. I take them everywhere with me and let them enjoy themselves. They’re always out of frame, but they are there – they watch the world and get to know it. Often, they’re bored (laughter).

L&F: And how did the rest of your family react?

was too small and after a few chapters I had to stop. There were too many things to take care of. Now when the children are older and independent, and I don’t have to take care of them so much and they understand what is going on, I finally have time to escape to a different world.

Agnieszka Płoszaj: First of all, it was a very big surprise. Apart from my closest family, nobody knew about it. And honestly… There are different reactions. Sometimes they envy me, sometimes compare me with somebody’s daughter who finished her studies and I am a hairdresser and still managed to write a book.

Why did I write it, not the university graduate?

That’s why I was not shocked when the journalists were asking how it happened that the hairdresser wrote a book?

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INSPIRATIONS L&F: Doesn’t it hurt you a bit when you are brought down as an authoress?

Agnieszka Płoszaj L&F: Do you have any favourite crime stories?

And preferred authoresses or authors? Or such authors that make a big impression on you?

Agnieszka Płoszaj: I don’t Focus on it.

L&F: I admire that attitude. When I was listening to interview with you, I felt bad hearing comparisons to others and some picky comments concerning your profession. If I were in your place, I wouldn’t be so composed.

Honestly, I don’t know what purpose such questions should serve.

Agnieszka Płoszaj: I think this is partly unintended. A reflex. The first association.

A hairdresser must be a silly little girl, but it turns out it’s not true!

L&F: Anyway, it’s sad. Just like judging whether the book is meaningful or not based on the genre. Some people think a crime story is an easy genre, while others do not. I believe this is a genre that requires good planning, selfcontrol. So it is complicated, just like every book in which you have to develop a plot.

Agnieszka Płoszaj: From Poland… Mariusz Czubaj, Mariusz Zielke. A very good debut story

by Bartek Szczygielski who wrote “Aorta”.

I have very positive opinion about him. From abroad: Jo Nesbo, Stieg Larsson, Gianrico Carofiglio.

L&F: So you prefer male authors?

Agnieszka Płoszaj: It just happens like that and I don’t know why.

L&F: They say women’s writing differs from men’s.

Agnieszka Płoszaj: It’s like asking who is a better driver: a woman or a man? This is very individual, just like writing. I know that I am more delicate in some descriptive issues, scenes; that there are more feminine situations in my writing.

Agnieszka Płoszaj: I don’t discredit romance, social novels or women’s literature that is quite distant and unfamiliar for me because I never liked such writing.

L&F: Yes, I would not expect any beauty routines in male writing. Maybe something about cars.

L&F: But you read crime stories?

Agnieszka Płoszaj: Not necessarily because I have never read any descriptions with so many details.

Agnieszka Płoszaj: Of course.

L&F: Polish ones too?

Agnieszka Płoszaj: Yes.

L&F: Because they give names and brands.

Agnieszka Płoszaj: Because everybody knows what it’s about, so why discuss it? (laughter).

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INSPIRATIONS L&F: But there were authors and authoresses who hid their identity to publish a different genre and nobody guessed that it was a book written by somebody of a different sex. So maybe such perception is limiting for us?

Agnieszka Płoszaj: We are easily cheated.

Agnieszka Płoszaj of that area… Or just to protect myself from going too deep into a subject which may not be appreciated by somebody. I would not like to be seen as a potential risk by anybody. It often happens that specific persons get a fragment of the text from me to comment on. I have such partners all the time. That’s what I aim at. The policemen described in my book are not just

L&F: So maybe this is because of the writing method, I mean the writing skills. Hard to say.

Agnieszka Płoszaj: In one of the interviews, it is said that “Czarodziejka” is a book for women.

Not so bloody. And my reply was centred on “Vaneska” which I wrote for Pocisk magazine.

“Vaneska” is very drastic. It is about an infant who is abused and its dysfunctional family.

When I sent the text to the editor, they called me to say they were shocked, especially since I am a mother of two. And it was printed that way I wrote it. They decided the text was overwhelming. And my reply was that my policemen were too subtle, etc.

L&F: Well the policemen had to adjust their working methods to the people they came across. If they wanted to act abruptly, then there would be no cooperation. And the case would have never been solved (laughter).

Agnieszka Płoszaj: Yes, this is action-reaction.

Because I also come across people. My writing does not mean that I lock myself in my room and write and don’t go out. I work with different people, mostly my acquaintances and friends.

I have this support - I can always call them to consult them about some things or ask about something. I meet policemen, pathologists or the other side. Because the gangster motif Mega*Zine *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742 required me to have atLost&Found least vague knowledge

INSPIRATIONS born out of my imagination because I am a woman and I would like them to be carefully tended. This is because I know such people and they look like that, they behave like that.

I don’t need to use stereotypes because reality offers me much more interesting cases.

Besides, the times when the police drank too much are long gone. Currently, there is so much red tape in the police, that there is no place left for any non-standard behaviour. The whole system of working requires them to be careful at each step. They have to do a lot of paperwork, fill in statistics. It’s not as easy as shown on TV or in cinemas.

L&F: In your book you have also touched on the motif of insults, rapes and other types of abuse towards women. One the heroines thinks it is not worth notifying the police about such behaviour because the result will not be good.

Agnieszka Płoszaj: Yes, I know what the situation is. I know what it is like. We, as a society, must grow to understand some issues. Eradicate stereotypes and convictions that it is the girl who is guilty. But it takes time.

And I only show it, I signal the subject. The rest is up to the readers. But if we are talking about sensitive subjects – the second part would be a real bomb. What happens in “Czarodziejka” is only a prelude. It opens the series and both Julka and other characters serve as an introduction to what will happen later. I feel that if people read the first part from the perspective of the third, which is now being written, they will see it in a totally different light. It will be something else but you have to get there.

Regarding the second part, it will centre on a very difficult subject for parents – teenagers and abortion. I discuss everything openly,

Agnieszka Płoszaj including prices and the whole system. How they deal with it, what is their attitude towards it.

Of course, it is all masked with my plot but it can be surprising since this is a subject matter that is generally avoided. I stress that for many mothers, the most important thing is that their daughters are not getting married with big bellies and that the child comes “at a right time”.

They do not think what happened earlier. This is the aspect that can be shocking that many mothers don’t know what happens in their daughters’ lives. I gave myself a lot of freedom here. The book is longer and definitely not so funny. Of course, there is still Magdalena who destroys the action with her every appearance and she will wreak havoc and cause a lot of problems to everybody around. She is very visible, probably more than in the first part.

Mania is gently moved to the margin and we are slowly saying goodbye to her. But her place is taken by a new character and things get more exciting. I mean the action is more dynamic.

L&F: I must admit that when I was thinking about what we have mentioned already, the suspended issue of whether it is better to kidnap children and give them a better life, or leave them at home, I asked myself some questions about abortion and access to it, so in a way, the second part forms a logical connection for me.

Agnieszka Płoszaj: I must stress that my goal was not to promote abortion, or discourage it or the people who resort to it. These are very complex problems where views of the world mix with religion and what you know about a given subject and what you want to know and accept.

If somebody sees pregnancy as a problem that

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INSPIRATIONS has to be eliminated, a specific behaviour will occur. Besides, during the conversations I had with the girls, it turned out they did not really know how long ovulation was and what it all is about… This is quite scary that you don’t know and understand your own body, but these are the consequences of lack of necessary education. They have no knowledge of their organisms, not to mention the general rules.

They don’t know themselves. And this is the essential problem for me – the absence of a proper education. There is a scene when a girl goes with her mother to a professor. She is sixteen years old and not interested in what

Agnieszka Płoszaj goes on around her. Actually, the mother settles everything. The doctor asks her how much she knows about her organism. And she turns aggressive, labels him as stupid and tries to leave the room. It is hard for a person with no knowledge at all to decide about anything, their own lives included. I hope, and I leave this issue open and don’t judge, that people will think about the need to educate.

L&F: Do you think they will read it that way?

Aren’t you afraid that they might understand something in a wrong way again and will use

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INSPIRATIONS your book to prove that it is necessary to ban access to abortion?

Agnieszka Płoszaj: I don’t know. I cannot foresee that. As a counterbalance, I created a figure of a woman of different faith. This subject is quite sensitive and it kind of happened by chance because I did not plan it initially. The woman who desperately wants to have a child and cannot have it because of her past. Because of the events that changed her life. And although she has a person she loves next to her, she cannot give him and herself the long desired child. This is a clash of two situations – an older woman with totally different view of things, a man who in involved in such matters and the girls. I think it can serve as some sort of protection. The book will be highly controversial also because it shows some practices and violence against women.

L&F: And what will be the subject matter of the third part, if I am already asking you about the future? Because I can see that you explore important social issues. So you probably hope that they will move people, force them to think, open something in their heads?

Agnieszka Płoszaj: Exactly...

L&F: So the change is inscribed in you (laughter).

Agnieszka Płoszaj: It’s not about making anybody feel guilty but about drawing attention to some things. I am not talking about saving the world here but more about awareness.

Speaking from the perspective of a mother of two daughters (they are still small and don’t cause such problems), I know that my contacts

Agnieszka Płoszaj with 16-year-olds, who train at my salon from the age of sixteen to nineteen, made me understand that they don’t have anybody to talk to or anybody to ask about some things. This teaches me that I want to have good contact with my children, that I must watch and be attentive not to miss anything.

L&F: Ok, but the third part?

Agnieszka Płoszaj: The third part is now in the making. There will be the problem of rejection, of a child being undervalued. Mainly negligence by the father. The whole story is a huge allusion to the history of Łódź. And it will be a the most Łódź-focused book, including the history of the city. It will be complex. Facts mixed with fiction.

In particular, the figure of the father, the ancestor who for some reason did not accept the child or rejected it. It will be closely linked to the story of a family of factory owners. A big project. Especially, the search for historical information is very demanding.

L&F: But it is also a lot of fun?

Agnieszka Płoszaj: Yes, with Julka and the rest of them. Their lives, their boyfriends. Their relations, unstable…

L&F: “Czarodziejka” was promoted with the information that it is the beginning of a series about mysterious crimes in Łódź. Does it mean there will be three parts or do you plan to write more?

Agnieszka Płoszaj: I don’t know. For now, there will be three parts but you never know. My editor would like to have more of them but I am not sure if a given character will not be

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INSPIRATIONS “exploited” at some point. I wouldn’t like to do anything forcibly. If I run out of ideas, I will move to other things.

L&F: I have to admit that I was thinking about how long a given character can be used. I know that some people wrote all their lives using the same characters. But I’m not sure if it does not get boring at some point.

Agnieszka Płoszaj: I let myself add new figures from time to time, and remove some old ones. In the second part, I remove Mania and introduce Ginger. And this is a completely different person who also disrupts the atmosphere in a different way..

L&F: How many of your characters are inspired by reality?

Agnieszka Płoszaj: For instance, with respect to the policemen, I focus more on mutual relations. And the relations are taken from life, just like in the case of my husband and his friend. Their coarse replies. Everything, including some of the tension, is real. The police characters are a mix of different people.

As for Magda, she is a funny combination of various women that I have had the chance to meet and watch in my salon. Their behaviour when none of their family members is around, when they relax and suddenly can talk and joke openly… This behaviour will not be judged. And Madga is a combination of the funniest and warmest persons that visit me. Her curvy figure proves it too because slim ladies are very few.

L&F: but in the first part, a neighbour was such an imperfect, person – not really slim.

Agnieszka Płoszaj Agnieszka Płoszaj: Yes, Mrs. Czupinowa. But Mrs. Czupinowa is actually a real person, not living anymore, but made of real flesh, blood and bones.

L&F: What about the flour motif?

Agnieszka Płoszaj: It’s true. The situation was stupid, absurd and beyond imagination but totally true. And the face of the police woman when it was all explained actually reflected my own reaction. I also couldn’t believe it. It was one of those delicate moment, one of the situations I had to preserve.

L&F: And how did the prototype of Mania react to the book?

Agnieszka Płoszaj: I went to meet her on purpose, before the book was published, to show it to her. Initially, she reacted cautiously saying that I must be crazy. But after reading it, she concluded that those things did not bother her and she laughed at the stories I managed to remember.

L&F: And your parents?

Agnieszka Płoszaj: My dad knew I was doing something like that and every week or every other week he got the next fragment to read.

I was more or less in the middle, when he told me that I could not stop at that point because things had gone too far already. He motivated me not to stop. Just like me, he does not show his true emotions. I know he is very happy and proud because of what has happened. As for my mum, this is a totally different personality.

She is much more expressive. She is also

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INSPIRATIONS pleased and enjoys boasting about it in front of her friends (laughter).

L&F: Did you find any new clients and fans?

Did your earlier clients knew who they were visiting?

Agnieszka Płoszaj: Yes. I think all my clients know about the book.

L&F: Did they ask for autographs?

Agnieszka Płoszaj Agnieszka Płoszaj: Yes. Each of them came of a copy of the book and asked me to sign it.

Many of them came to the meeting with the author in Manufaktura, on the first day the book went on sale. It was very nice, really. One the clients, who does not live in Łódź, told me that she went for manicure in her town and they started talking about books and recommending books to each other. And when she asked in the manicurist had read “Czarodziejka” already, she answer that yes, a few months before and that everybody knew that book. And my client was so proud to be my regular salon-goer. That was great. A nice display of warm feelings. It is very nice.

L&F: And talking about nice events. You were involved in the action “Cała Polska czyta dzieciom”. Do you want to promote reading even further?

Agnieszka Płoszaj: Yes, definitely. I believe children are good listeners. But maybe this is the problem of attitude. When I do things like this, I sit on the floor and let them roll on the floor, which may give the impression they are not listening. But they are listening (laughter).

I read to them what they want. Sometimes it happens that I start reading and hear “boooooo”, meaning that they don’t want this story to be continued. So I reach for a different one. I get some signals from librarians that after such meetings with children, the children go out and borrow books. I don’t know if they really read them, but there is some interest in them.

And I read a lot to my girls. I try to.

L&F: But they haven’t read your book?

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INSPIRATIONS Agnieszka Płoszaj: No, no. I have read some fragments to them, mainly about Zuźka, the subtle ones. But on the whole, they know what the book is about. These are sensitive girls.

L&F: We have started our conversation with an anecdote from Book Fairs. I wanted to ask if some other fans managed to surprise you as well?

Agnieszka Płoszaj: Oh, yes. Once a reader told me that they were reading my book with her daughter and all the time they were going onto the internet to check the type of shoes, the make of a car, the songs, paintings, etc. Great!

I did not know one could get so involved, that somebody would like to read my book so thoroughly. When writing, I defined all details because I believe they define us in some way.

Thanks to the Internet, one can find all those objects and see them, see exactly the same things I saw during writing. These details are meaningful – I would not wear pink stilettoes but Mania does. This is the difference between characters. Or a latex skirt that is too short, just like Magda’s. And I wouldn’t pick a Skoda for somebody with a hot temper. I have nothing against Skodas but this is about showing your nature, style, appearance. That’s why the details were not accidental. They have their meaning and if somebody wants to study it, that’s great!

One day we went to the Stary Cmentarz (Old Cementery) with my husband. We were checking if a big Range Rover would be able to drive there. In theory. Would it pass through the gate? On the whole, I could write whatever I want to but I care about authenticity.

Agnieszka Płoszaj And in the book I thank my husband for helping me with different issues related to the plot, car chases, etc. because we often travel around Łódź and check different places, if you can travel a specific distance within a specific time or no. The scene with parking place – I took my children and we counted the number of lifts and if it is possible to get to the car unseen. Finally my daughter said that the man behind us was already signalling with his lights (laughter) because we were driving at 2 km per hour and we were counting metres. The guy behind us went mad.

L&F: You know that people who are watching you have no idea why you are doing that?

Agnieszka Płoszaj: Maybe it’s better but it just reminded me about a funny situation… It shows how much my girls are already into it and some situations make no impression on them anymore. In the second part there is a scene when Tomek joins the action quite abruptly to get some information form a woman. And he kind of strangles her a bit. And I say to my husband: when the girls go to bed, I’d like us to try to enact this scene because I would like to see what happens to the body and what you think and how you feel. It doesn’t matter that it is all pretend because I care about some general issues only. And I was mostly interested if we would fit into the door. And if it would work out.

We waited until the girls fell asleep. Our apartment is quite small and we have only one door that open in a correct direction – these are the doors in the girls’ room. They sleep in a bunk bed. So I say: listen, the action is like that: you burst into the room and immediately press me against the wall. And you have to do it

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INSPIRATIONS

Agnieszka Płoszaj

so that I cannot move. And it went like that.

Band, band, I was pressed against the wall and of the sudden I started to laugh because I saw two heads above me and I hear: Oh, come on.

They are practising for the book again. There was no fear in it. Our children were not scared we were fighting but they were irritated it was for the book again. No emotions whatsoever. It smells of fixation… (laughter).

L&F: Well, they do come to you. And no wonder! I wish you good luck with your writing because your debut was very successful! And I would like to thank you for your time and this conversation.

L&F: So you can say the whole family is involved in your writing. It is even nicer and I hope that you will continue to change literary market, attitude towards writing and writers together. I hope to read further story of Julka.

Photos were taken in coffee shop Jazzva in Lodz.

https://www.facebook.com/agnieszkaploszaj/

Agnieszka Płoszaj: For sure there will be further parts because the second one is waiting for its premiere and the third one, as already mentioned, in “being written”. These days I feel a strange itching if I don’t write even a short fragment. It is not about deadlines but about neglecting the subject. I owe this working system to my husband because when we sent “Czarodziejka” to the publisher and I kept on checking my mailbox all the time, he said that I should start writing the second part because if the first one is successful I wouldn’t have any time for writing. And he was right.

L&F: So when they publish the second part you should start writing the fourth one? (laughter) Agnieszka Płoszaj: I think I will (laughter). All this commotion with “Czarodziejka” means that writing of the third part takes a long time. And more people come to the salon, which also calls for my presence there….

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GALLERY

GraĹźyna AmbroĹźek

Many years ago, people decided to change the seashore into a port, and a small village into a bustling city - my city.

And although today's Gdynia has exceeded the expectations of her builders, while sitting at the pier on my favorite bench, I feel as they the same the wind from the sea. https://www.facebook.com/ga.aegisart/

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GALLERY

Grażyna Ambrożek

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Grażyna Ambrożek

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Grażyna Ambrożek

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Grażyna Ambrożek

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Grażyna Ambrożek

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Grażyna Ambrożek

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Grażyna Ambrożek

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Grażyna Ambrożek

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Grażyna Ambrożek

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Grażyna Ambrożek

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Grażyna Ambrożek

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Grażyna Ambrożek

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Grażyna Ambrożek

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PROSE

A diary of mistakes Lena was looking at those talking people and feeling she was moving away. The curtain she had been weaving for years between herself and people closed at the very moment when she tried to cross it for the first time ever. Rafał was not looking at Lena. He did not pick up the threads she was dropping and did not react to subtle gestures directed at him. Even him.

Although he loved her, although he knew they both were struggling. Reaching others was so strange for her, like music from a person who was born deaf. She was standing near, listening. From time to time she laughed and commented aloud.

At these brief moments, they discovered her existence. And she could not accuse them of indifference or unfriendliness.

Basically, she just appeared suddenly on the surface of the lake and then disappeared the next moment, leaving no waves on the surface.

She hid an unlit cigarette – this free pass to an extra break – she hung her bag over

Ada Filimonowicz her shoulder and walked around the corner of the building. It was a small car workshop – small and unauthorised – used by all nearby car wreck. Lena liked cars but she found even more pleasure in listening to people. She loved it as they as. Not languages, not literature but daily Jargon. She studied the despised “corporate speak”, numerous versions of teenage slang, mannerisms in the language of people in Warsaw living in old Praga district, or the incoherent language of drunkards. She took a lot of interest in listening to commonplace errors, pleonasms and elaborate distortions. She likes the music of speech disorders. She herself was devoid of all these original features but eager to play in mixing jargons and other symptoms of linguistic negligence.

‘This is ingenious’, wrote Rafał in a public mail to the whole editing team after reading her article about drugs, which she enriched with her playful tricks to fight boredom and frustration.

This is how it all started… Her own articles, reports that basically happened just like that – they were born after hours

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PROSE

Ada Filimonowicz

of watching people who never noticed her.

And her friendship with the chief editor, which gradually changed into a feeling.

Suddenly, the protection mechanisms Lena had developed over the years of struggling with her social phobia turned into her enemies. She was trying to bring down the walls she erected between herself and the world but it did not come so easily.

“Haven’t you noticed?”, she added in her mind.

The man was slightly tense. His slim face seemed even longer when he was trying to find any explanation. Lena briefly touched his arm with her fingertips.

‘Rafał, listen’, she started almost in whisper. ‘I know you’re trying so hard. I’m trying as well. Let’s stop accusing each other. It must take time.’

Monotonous work was in progress in the workshop, from time to time coloured with a bunch of curse words. After a few minutes, Lena turned back to go to the office. When passing her colleagues, she attracted their attention for a moment. She seemed colourful in her blue skirt with red shawl on her arms. Tall and slim like a poplar, she should be arising interest.

But she disappeared as soon as she left.

Rafał seized such moment and caught up with her in the staircase.

‘Why did you run like that? We were talking about Kaleo concert…’

Lena smiled uncertainly.

‘I know. I came later, when Sandra started talking about her son.’

The noise from downstairs signalled the smokers were coming. Lena started walking faster. Rafał allowed the workers to pass him and went outside again. He lit another cigarette. He kept the image of this unique woman in his memory for a moment. The outline of colourful, slim silhouette and dusky bland hair remained longest. And her large bag in which she carried many totally random objects. Then it all started to fade away, become neutral like the view from the window which you know so well that you cannot tell the colours anymore because you always see them through a greyish glass pane.

Lena’s glass pane was unclear like oneway mirror, and bulletproof. And the

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PROSE women still kept on reinforcing it at each lonely moment. Like a drunkard trying to get better she had to reach a moment when she will tell herself that she wanted a change. She said that but something in her heart replied “but it is not so bad yet”.

Well, she still talked to people. They still noticed her at work or in offices. Old friends still recognized her… still…. She felt she was flying faster and faster towards her own bottom.

At work she was sometimes pulled out from this apathy by meetings and messages popping out in her mailbox.

Outside work… Silent neighbours and silent four walls of her one-room apartment. The smell of tea, old furniture left behind by former owners and a glazed cabinet in the corner filled with strange objects – from old name plates, letters found at some attic, to a diary her friend stole from her mother and gave to Lena, feeling scared with her own actions. It happened one summer when they were in primary school. Later their paths separated and Weronika forgot about her friend and all things that pertained to her.

About the notebook too.

Ada Filimonowicz Lena has never read it but often felt tempted to do that. It was a thick notebook, full of loose sheets of paper, tickets and letters. She liked to imagine what was inside it. Weronika’s mother lived a very regular life, but even more the words she might have used to express this routine and boredom appeared fascinating. This curiosity made Lena keep a diary for some time. It soon changed from a tale of her life into a register of human speech. The woman was not happy with description of her own experience. They were an excellent material for linguistic purist but did not convey any irregularity, no personality.

Completed Polish studies with s p e c i a l i z a t i o n i n e d i t i n g a ff e c t e d everything. Disappointed Lena started writing down sentences she heard in the street. Along with precise notes on their intonation, tone of voice of the person uttering the sentence. In this war, the diary of a worker from the Hefra factory inspired a weird album which Lena filled every evening. It became her connection with the world.

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PROSE That day was not a successful one. The vulgarity of workshop staff, this new speech devoid of mean intentions they developed among themselves had already often appeared on the notebook pages.

Lena likes to note down curses, especially when they lost the role of “means for expressing emotions” and became a “comma” applied automatically and pointlessly. She knew this manner of talking too well. She craved for something new. When she got back home, she prepared tea, wandering around the conversations she heard that day. She did not go to bed until she’d written at least one sentence in the notebook. If the day did not bring her anything, she went on her search. She walked into the streets and listened to people on the tram, in restaurants, coming home from parties and hurrying to catch train at 3.55, which will arrive 20 minutes late and we kindly apologise to awaiting passengers for all inconvenience. She never provokes anything, never guessed – long, patient observation always brought good results.

Such search could take up the whole night.

Ada Filimonowicz She finished her tea and started preparing dinner. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a silent phone. She wanted it to start ringing and at the same time she feared it might do just that. She knew she would not answer it as always. With a strangely shaking heart she will wait through all signals and then, forcing herself to do that, she will call back. She will start with the well-worn: “Hi, I saw you called me. The phone was in my bag and I did not hear it”. Or no. She will not have the courage to call back.

She went out already after dark. There was still some life in the streets but it did not have the same energy and pace like during the day, which made Lena feel like an old film tape was moving in front of her eyes. An old high school building, AlmaMer – ten storey-high, monolithic block, partly covered with a dirty sheet of some billboard – has been looking scary with its dark windows from several years now. Lena always looked at them when she passed the building. She watched the progressing decay, consecutive broken

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PROSE window panes, new graffiti… She was tempted to finally go inside and listen to the life in the building. She was a few steps away from the dilapidated entrance when remains of the window on the first floor fell down and broke into pieces under the woman’s feet. Len stopped suddenly and took a deep breath. She felt strange – as if she was drunk or at somebody’s mercy, helpless. She knew this feeling. It often led her to interesting materials – to the diary and reports.

‘I think I have to…’, she murmured to herself half-consciously and turned to the entrance.

She passed by the broken glass door and went to explore darkness covered with rubbish and glass. She accelerated, scared by the noise with which each step tore apart the existing silence. Without a torch, dizzy and in her slippers. She fell forward, losing her balance. She tried to support herself and protect her face with her stretched arms, but pieces of glass ran into her hands, forearms and knees.

Lena did not even scream. Her first reaction was to get up. Next, she started towards the exit, crying. She started

Ada Filimonowicz sobbing when she almost fall for the second time. She was walking on glass and could not control her shivering body.

She felt blood running down her legs and her arms pulsating with pain.

‘Hey, lady, what are you doing here?’, a drunken voice reached her from above.

Somebody was trying to get down, reached her and put a lighter to her face.

Shaky light revealed bloodshot, slightly protruding eyes hidden under a tall forehead covered with wrinkles.

‘Oh fuck’, the man murmured, apparently confused. ‘Well… yeah, maybe I can help you somehow?’

She looked at herself helplessly. For a moment she imagined passing out here.

Who would be looking for her? Who will help her? Her invisibility had its price.

‘Can you help me get out of here. I feel sick’, she whispered.

The man clumsily grabbed her arm. His movements were nervous and super careful. As if he had not touched anybody for a long time and was afraid to hurt her.

‘Can I take you by the hand?’, he offered breathing the smell of digested alcohol into Lena’s face.

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PROSE She passively accepted his help. She managed to collect herself only when they reached the cold concrete outside. She started searching her bag with bloodcovered hands, trying to find some money to pay for his help.

‘Lady, you’d better call the ambulance’, muttered the drunkard, never taking his eyes off her hands.

“Call?”, she thought and felt overwhelmed with fear. To talk? Try to explain herself?

‘I can manage’, she replied offering the man a banknote. ‘And thank you…’

‘I’d like you to come back here one day and talk to me’, he muttered, carefully hiding the money in his pocket. ‘Like a person to a …’

‘I don’t really talk. I only listen.’

Lena got up and covered her hands with a scarf. The man’s eyes beamed with some drunken satisfaction.

‘So you should come. I … I can even buy some wine.’

‘Alright… I should be going now.’

He nodded and moved out of her way.

‘My name is Klement’, he shouted after her.

Ada Filimonowicz He introduced himself and probably this prevented Lena from forgetting him immediately.

She waited a few hours in the hospital as they kept on telling her ‘yes, yes, someone will be with you in a minute.’

Finally, out of desperation, she called Rafał who hurried into the waiting room like a hurricane, argued with everybody and organized help in fifteen minutes.

Then, they took out the glass, put on stiches, gave her a vaccine against tetanus and let her go home in the light of rising sun and amidst a series of questions she did not want to answer. She got off Rafał’s car as is she was leaving a taxi, briefly thanking him and saying goodbye. She walked into her apartment alone. She closed her diary without writing a single word which had not happened for a long time. And then her thoughts flew towards that man. His name that kind of fitted into her diary not because it was a linguistic error but because it was a flaw of reality that usually resorted to Zenek, Mietek or simply Janek on such occasions. And that was Klement. She sighed heavily and crawled into her bed.

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PROSE She tried to pick up her pen but it slipped through her swollen, bandaged fingers.

Finally, she scribbled the name with difficulty.

And soon that name turned into the essence of the diary. Even though Lena tried to stop herself from going to that abandoned building until the end of her sick leave. She remembered her fear and Klement’s hopeful eyes when she said she was a listener rather than a talker. Her mind warned her not to trust the drunkard’s emotions but Lena did not really care. The only thing she did not fear in people was getting hurt by them. She feared their judging eyes, relaxed communication, talking about oneself and expectations of others. But here she did not expect such things. And when she was thus struggling with herself, her problems got solved by fate.

‘Well, it’s you. Hey! Lady! How are your wounds? Are you ok now?’, a familiar voice stopped her in the street.

Lena felt goosebumps on her shoulders.

A stupid, mechanical reaction forced her hand into the pocket for some coins. But

Ada Filimonowicz she stopped herself. She took a deep breath.

‘Oh, yes, I’m getting better. I will visit you tomorrow, maybe a day after tomorrow.

You wanted to talk.’

‘I wanted to tell you things. To talk to another person. Yes… right…’

Suddenly, there was no ‘hey’, no ‘lady’.

A serious, tired man was looking at her.

He was not very old but he was in ruin.

‘Why don’t you go to the Alcoholics Anonymous?’, it was the only question she asked during their first meeting.

They were sitting in school chairs among dilapidated furniture. As promised, Klement bought cheap wine and had drunk it all before she came because he was ‘so stressed’ as he put it. He talked a lot. Painfully and openly, crying and mixing the language of a Polish teacher with the talk of a regular vagabond.

‘I don’t drink because I have to but I drink because I want to. You’d also want to drink if you lived here’.

She did not argue. When an addict does not want to change, nothing will convince him. She only made a promise to herself

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PROSE to mention it on the next occasion. She already knew there would be ‘the next occasion’ – as her interlocutor put it. She noted he consciously used the phrase from ‘Va Banque’ and that is how she put it down in her diary in the evening. And she returned on the next day, bringing him a bag full of goods. She soon learned to find her way around AlmaMer. Most of the top floors were identical, split into lecture rooms and demolished by squatters and even more ferocious visitors. But there still were places when the decay climate obtained a specific, attractive attire. That was the case with old chemistry labs that still boasted broken smoke exhaust pipes.

It was in them where he told her most about the school.

‘Now you see, ma’am. And I became a teacher… so that I even live at school.

A joke of fate, right?’

“A joke of fate” took her editorial office by storm. Someone even joked that if Lena gets her own column one day, she will have to call it like that.

‘I thought about the AA thing you’ve mentioned ma’am’, started Klement one day.

Ada Filimonowicz His voice was changed, he was clearly scared. His hands were shaking and drops of sweat glistened on his forehead.

‘Today I will try to speak without drinking’, he replied under her surprised eyes.

Lena smiled as warmly as she could but deep inside she felt panic. Because of the substance withdrawal, delirium, epilepsy…! He must go to the detox ward.

Or at least suplement magnesium, eat well … She wanted to run to the shop but his eyes told her that he will drink if she leaves him.

They sat down in stairs leading to flooded basement because Klement could not bear too much light. He spoke in a confused manner, as if surprised. He repeated what she had already heard but without the alcohol he tried to ease his emotions with mockery. He spoke more carefully than usually but his speech was not coherent.

‘Damn, let me say so’, he burst out one moment. ‘Such conversation is good for nothing. I cannot go on. Now you talk.

Maybe I will learn how to do it being sober.’

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PROSE ‘So maybe I will go to the shop. You must drink a lot now. Maybe chocolate, some vitamins…’

She jumped to her feet but he grabbed her by her wrist with his both hands and did not want to let her go.

‘No! Don’t leave me. Talk to me. Talk to me or I will be scared.’

‘But I’ve got nothing to talk about’, she objected but did not try to free herself.

‘Talk to me and I will listen. You talk so nicely. You must be intelligent. You can even talk about the weather. I will listen.’

He shivered like in fever. She slowly sat down on the stairs again. About the weather? This task was much more difficult than it seemed. All this “small talk” you should use to fill in the void so that people you don’t care about think you’re interested in their opinion was too much for Lena.

‘I talk nicely…’, she muttered, her eyes on the floor. ‘You have put it so nicely too.

I just talk correctly. I studied philology. But editorial philology. I work for a magazine.’

She felt he had focused his attention on her even though his eyes were moving around the floor.

Ada Filimonowicz ‘Yes, please keep on talking’, he urged her.

She cautiously continued… about the editing office, about the language. Fear pushed the words back into her throat but she kept on talking. Against herself, but for herself as well. And for the man who was sitting beside her, asking her to speak plainly because he did not understand a lot in his condition but would like to be able to follow what she was saying. She shyly tried to talk about Rafał. And although Klement repeated now and then “what a moron, what an idiot, he does not appreciate you”, she saw their whole relationship in full light for the first time ever.

She left Klement worried but full of energy.

On her way home, she picked out Rafał’s number.

‘What happened?’, she heard his nervous voice.

‘Nothing. I’m going for a walk. I thought you’d like to meet by the Vistula river.’

Everything was perfect when they were together because their closeness developed sort of accidentally. But when they went to their homes, they were like

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PROSE strangers again. Lena could not worry about it. She hurried to write down Klement’s words. The diary ceased to be a record of human speech a long time ago. Now it was a record of drunkard’s feelings mixed with his drunken biography.

A diary of change that could turn out to be a momentary nuisance but it still gave hope.

In the morning, before work, Lena visited Klement. She found him exhausted but sober. She was late at work. These three sentences could be used to describe the next nine days. Then Klement drank and Lena did not go to work at all.

Her life started to resemble a swing – she appeared and disappeared, following the rhythm of the drinking and speech of the homeless man. She saw Rafał was tired with this situation but she could not stop it.

It was a beginning of their passionate evenings and afternoon fights. But for the first time ever Lena felt that she wanted to be visible through her fear, joy and sorrow.

She should have listened more carefully to the sound of glass crushed under somebody’s shoes on the ground floor on that day. Instead she looked at shaky

Ada Filimonowicz Klement, reading with mockery the pages she tore out of the notebook in the morning.

‘I will not drink again, no matter what happens’, he laughed. ‘I put well, didn’t I?’

„It would be enough if you told yourself every day and every hour that you won’t drink again. Every hour…”, she thought as he was reading the record of his drunken emotions, sober tears and alcoholic babble.

Rafał walked into an old lecture room, making a lot of noise and turning down a chair.

‘What the hell are you doing here? Have you lost your mind?’, he erupted.

Then he was at loss for words on seeing his beautiful colourful Lena sitting in a dirty room full of bottles in the company of some lout. Now he understood where her accident happened and what occupied the majority of her evenings over the past weeks.

‘But I only listen and watch, as always…’

‘As always?! I saw your notebook! You’re trying to be a damn therapist or what?!’

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PROSE ‘No! calm down. Stop shouting at me.’

‘The lady is trying to help me’, said Klement with surprising dignity.

‘I might as well help you in a moment’, hissed Rafał taking a step forward.

Lena jumped up.

‘Enough! We’re leaving. I will explain it all to you somewhere else’, she said, feeling it was beyond her to explain it all.

‘I don’t want our life to be shaped by some drunkard!’, shouted Rafał.

People in the café looked at him as if he was crazy. Lena was sitting still, slowly drinking tea. She seemed unreal in this picture, so unfitted that barely anybody noticed her. Her glanced at their surroundings, trying to use her eyes to make somebody see her tears but the glass was too thick. And Lena was not there. There was only a shadow that attracted nobody’s attention. And the woman realised that Rafał’s fury was the final proof she had stepped from behind her curtain.

‘You’ve liked that I listen to people and study their language. I also watch him, I am learning… I could use it to write something’, she tried to defend herself.

Ada Filimonowicz She was not honest. She did not go there to listen to him. She went there because she believed she could help him. And because he did not understand feeling just like her. His stories were like discovering them again.

‘An accident. Days off work, one big mess…! It’s not enough for you? It started to be better, damn it! Why do you want to screw it? It started to be normal…’

‘It’s because of these meetings in AlmaMer. That man is learning about himself and I am learning about myself.

Why can’t you understand it?!’

‘And me? I don’t count?!’

‘You? I love you but it will not work out unless I change. And I am trying to do that’.

‘Do to a fucking therapy! Go to a psychiatrist. I don’t know, go to a hypnotist. But you cannot make a drunkard your guru.’

She gritted her teeth. “It’s my therapy. My meeting. I need this for myself. For us! For us…?”, she screamed in her mind.

She watched Rafał got up and pay the bill.

‘Call me, when you’ve thought over this all’, he stated coldly.

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PROSE Lena nodded and watched the waitress collect the cups with vague smile. Also her unfinished tea. A second later she turned back and looked at the woman still sitting at the table.

‘God, I’m sorry. I have not noticed…’

‘No problem’, whispered Lena her cheeks turning red.

She was ashamed of the girl’s mistake, of her own invisibility, of Rafał’s screams and of Klement who was probably drinking now to ease the stress. She rushed out of the café.

She wrote a message for Rafał at night but was afraid to send it. She imagined him calling her back and them both repeating the eternal scheme of unanswered calls, accusations, apologies.

Instead it was all silent at night. She was on time at work and carefully did her job without any breaks for cigarette.

Somewhere in the corridor she noted Rafał’s sad glance. “It was not supposed to be like that”, they said in their minds and walked their own ways.

In the evening she almost ran to AlmaMer. She passed the floor where several

Ada Filimonowicz homeless people were having their argument and peeked into the room that served as Klement’s bedroom. The man was not there. There was a page of the diary on the chair she used to sit. A few words had been scribbled on its back: “No matter what happens, I will go to that fucking meeting. I am sure somebody deserved to listen to my divagations”. She smiled. “Divagations”, she repeated and this error, probably, unintended for a moment eased the painful loneliness that overwhelmed her.

She got back home, wrote this sentence in her diary and turned the page.

On the back, she wrote the sentence from e-mail sent by Rafał. An error in the farewell, in the sad settlement of short days they have shared.

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GALLERY

Helena Rajska

Helena Rajska, born on September 27, 1990.

Architect's engineer by profession. By passion I deal with ceramics and painting.

I prefer to talk by my paintings, I leave the interpretations to the recipient.

I’m not looking for perfection... I just extract and throw out my emotions. I try not to stick to patterns, I allow myself to make mistakes.

Each picture shows the changes that have occurred in my life. https://www.facebook.com/CeramikaUzytkowa/

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GALLERY

Helena Rajska

Portrait of a husband, Krosnowice oil on canvas, format 60x80 cm Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

GALLERY

Helena Rajska

Return oil on canvas, format 50x60 cm Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

GALLERY

Helena Rajska

View on Aker Brygge, 2017 oil on canvas, format 50x50 cm Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

GALLERY

Helena Rajska

Portrait of husband and son, 2015 oil on canvas, format 50x40 cm Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

GALLERY

Helena Rajska

Portrait of son, 2015 oil on canvas, format 50x60 cm Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

GALLERY

Helena Rajska

Selfportrait with son, 2015 oil on canvas, format 50x60 cm Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

POETRY edit. by P. Kasperowicz

Ewa Jakubek

"Returns" I will not return to sadness To the old battles, confusion in the soul Explanations into emptiness.

To rest, to breathe, to forget.

I’m learning not to reproach The moments because they occurred.

Now I know that the ring Which easily slips on the finger Brings no happiness.

We will visit each other – You and I In our separate selves.

translation by Ewa Jakubek

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INSPIRATIONS While looking for something new, I found her profile on Facebook. I was charmed by the colours and photographic precision, complexity and secrecy. On the one hand, her paintings seemed realistic, on the other – surreal. Figures covered with water emerged from multicolour shapes.

These works attracted me and I followed the artist online. But it was one of the photos used by the artist to promote her new picture that made me introduce her to you. So to keep things

Aleksandra Hońko short, I would like to invite you to read a conversation with Aleksandra Hońko, a graduate from the Department of Painting at the Wrocław Academy of Fine Arts, in the studio of Professor Leszek Mickoś and Anna Kram, MA, and from Artistic Education in the scope of Fine Arts at the University of Warmia and Mazury, in the studio of Eugeniusz Małkowski and Zygmunt Droński.

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INSPIRATIONS

Aleksandra Hońko

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INSPIRATIONS

Aleksandra Hońko

L&F: Your Facebook profile includes a series of paintings in a very summery and seemingly light mood. What made you create such works?

anxiety, although to me this feeling can be attributed to a figure that is momentarily out of breath, stopped in motion, entrapped…

Aleksandra Hońko: The concept for these works was born during my summer trip a few years ago. I was fascinated by water, its motion, reflection, and the relationship with what is under and over the water surface. A body inscribed in water gained a totally new meaning. It became deformed, absorbed sunrays reflected from the water surface. These phenomena started to intrigue me. I became their regular observer.

L&F: Does it mean that your works had some therapeutic values as well? Or did you manage to tame the element of water is some other way?

L&F: I am tempted to ask if you have a small water tank that you watch at home? Maybe some aquarium? Not necessarily with fish…

Aleksandra Hońko: No, no… I rest at home and act like a normal human being who cooks lunch, cleans the house, etc.

L&F: I was secretly hoping for the aquarium…

Well, as already mentioned, at first glance, the colour palette you use makes the atmosphere of your paintings a cheerful one. But there is also something worrying, even mysterious in your works. What do you feel when you paint?

Aleksandra Hońko: Sun, water, swimming pool, beach, etc. All these words evoke positive emotions in us. However, water is one of the elements. It is beautiful but powerful and dangerous. A long time ago, I nearly drowned in a lake. For a long time I could not walk into open water But now, I am not afraid anymore.

When painting, I focus on aesthetic aspects, on my workshop. It’s possible that subconsciously I give my paintings a sense of mystery or

Aleksandra Hońko: It’s possible. I don’t know.

Even if that was the case, it happened totally without my knowledge. Generally, I am quite a fearful person, but maybe it would be better to say “sensitive”… I have a lot of respect for the elements.

L&F: You’ve made the underwater world the setting of your paintings. And you have placed a man there. Yet, the figures are deformed, which often happens when you watch something through water. Some of them are totally deprived of identity, while others have managed to preserve it. Who are your models?

Aleksandra Hońko: The figures are me and my husband. We can develop projects during each summer trip, at any time of day and regardless of lighting. My first underwater paintings featured a male figure in red shorts.

Totally impersonal. I have an impression that water was more important in those works than man. In the recent ones, which are focused on underwater portraits, we can see some emotions, mood and mimics.

L&F: So the series began with water and a shapeless body. Now you let the body “become” and attract attention. I have to admit that it brings birth to my mind. Do you already know where this process will take you?

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INSPIRATIONS Aleksandra Hońko: I have no idea. There is no ready-made plan. I paint because I enjoy it, and currently I am painting what I like and what helps me develop. I feel that my underwater paintings comprise a specific cycle at this stage, some type of story about these figures.

But I am still not fully satisfied. And where is it heading for? I don’t think I need so much order in my drawers. I am more spontaneous.

L&F: One of the invitations to your exhibition says that your painting “soothes nerves better than a warm bath”. Does it also soothe your nerves?

Aleksandra Hońko: Painting is important for me. I cannot place it in my life hierarchy but I cannot imagine my life without it either. Does it

Aleksandra Hońko soothe my nerves? I paint in silence, alone, because this is how I like it. I relax while painting, even though there are many emotions linked to it, which results from my concentration.

L&F: Can you tell me more about them?

Aleksandra Hońko: I feel that this type of painting requires the eye to be focused. I don’t use any projectors or contemporary “facilitating” tools in the painting process. That is why I force my eye to work! It can be hard to believe, but after several hours of painting I am as tired as if I’ve ploughed a few acres of farm land. And I relax in a different sense. We rarely have time to be alone with ourselves. When I paint I usually make life plans, make important decisions, and think about issues I cannot focus on every day.

L&F: I must admit that I paid more attention to your paintings after seeing a photo with the caption “jump and on the wall”. It looks like you are dancing in the photo and it is so optimistic that it is difficult to turn your eyes away from it. I feel that artists are afraid to show themselves in cheerful shots as if fearing it may make them lose value or importance. And you seem to have a different approach to your image – you smile, make faces, dance and jump. What is your secret?

Aleksandra Hońko: I am easy going and friendly. I enjoy painting.

In the photos, I am natural and try

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INSPIRATIONS

Aleksandra Hońko

to “smuggle” my personality in the context of what I am doing.

change with time or will this series be always present in your work?

L&F: Let me move to a different issue – the reception of your works. For me it is clear – I like them. They are somewhere between photography, posters and paintings. They are fragments of aquaria that you can hang on the wall without worrying about their occupants, dirty water and feeding… They please the eye and are atmospheric: water is an element from which you can expect different things. But there are different opinions on your profile; sometimes they are very negative, even critical, and not critical in the opening, developing sense. How do you cope with the fact that each of us sees something else in your works and perceives them in a different way (and even worse – tries to share his or her opinion with you)?

Aleksandra Hońko: I don’t know how long I will continue to paint water. For the time being, this subject is endless for me. All the time, I find new artistic problems, dependencies and inspirations. I am lost!

Aleksandra Hońko: Thanks. When posting photos to my social media profile we have to aware of the consequences. There are as many opinions as followers. Usually I get many positive and motivating comments. I read them all and try to reply to most of them. This also applies to the negative ones. Constructive criticism is always valuable. I am learning and developing my workshop all the time. However, my own commentry on what I do is most important for me.

L&F: And what’s your comment?

Aleksandra Hońko: Do your job Alexandra!

L&F: I strongly support such an approach! But, coming back to the “underwater” aspect: It has become your trademark. Do you think it will

L&F: Will you share with us some of these problems, dependencies and inspirations?

Aleksandra Hońko: Problems in the artistic context of course… I have a feeling that the more I paint, the more I see. This style of painting is good training for your eyes. I find new ideas about painting structure, mutual connection of colours, compositions, etc. Detail is more important in my recent paintings.

L&F: So the more you fet into it, the more complicated it becomes.

But, regarding novelties and changes, I wanted to ask if you still remember your first painting?

What was it about? Have you changed a lot since then?

Aleksandra Hońko: I don’t remember it exactly. When I was a child, I drew nice patterns in kindergarten. In primary school, my best grades were in Art but I decided to pursue artistic education only in the final year of secondary school. A lot has changed since that time. My first paintings were very intuitive, like training. A lot has changed since then. I have met great people and learnt a lot about the history of art. I’ve visited galleries and museums. And I continue to do that. This is a process, I am still flowing.

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INSPIRATIONS L&F: Flowing? Hm… I can see that this fluidity is, in a metaphorical way, present in our conversation. Water is important for you not only because you’ve made it a character of your works but it also gives you something – what is it?

Aleksandra Hońko: I live with this water on daily basis. It is my everyday companion who I get to know better and better. You know, a kind of friend.

Aleksandra Hońko

https://www.facebook.com/AleksandraHońko-174757832718959/ Photos from the archives of A. Hońko Paintings belong to the cycle Basen/Pool

L&F: I must admit you have a powerful friend.

Since our conversation will be included in the “A Change” issue, I wanted to ask you one last question. As a person that watches the changeability of water, its impact on optics, on an immersed body – how do you define this change and what do you associate with it?

Aleksandra Hońko: I regard water as stability rather than changeability. But I love changes in life. Not the fundamental ones of course, but I don’t like stagnation or monotony. I cannot live without change. I need impulses, changes in my surroundings… But I think it all boils down to the word “development”. Yes! I think the word “change” is a factor that defines development in my life.

L&F: Great! So I would like to wish you many inspiring changes for your further development.

Thank you for your time.

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INSPIRATIONS

Aleksandra Hońko

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PROSE

Istvan Vizvary

Table cloth white as snow. Red candles.

Fresh roses in my favourite vase.

Baked salmon with herb gravy. Rocket with sprouts and parmesan. Dry white wine. Not from Chile or California, but a good one, from France, Touraine.

I’m sitting in one chair, my husband in the other. The late husband, Doctor Grzegorz Traska. He’s always loved salmon, ever since I can recall it.

‘Here’s to my husband’s memory!’, I raise my glass and take a sip of Touraine.

‘Enjoy it, Grzesio! Cheers! And here’s to our happiness! Mine and yours!’

The doorbell rings at this very moment.

I put down my glass and try to fight off irritation. It was supposed to be a dinner for two!

Grzegorz returned home thirteen days after his death.

I had just come back from the cemetery when the doorbell rang. I barely had time to hang my coat. With my make up on I could pass for a person that does not spend each night crying, but the dirty dishes and rubbish which had accumulated over the past two weeks filled the house with a stiff smell.

It was a young man in a black suit with subtle stripes with a very solemn face.

‘My name is Sielski. Antoni Sielski’, he gave me his card. ‘I represent the ‘New world’ funeral home in which…’

‘I remember’, I interrupted him. ‘All payments have surely been settled.’

‘Oh no, I wouldn’t dare bother you with something like payments.’

‘So why do you bother me?’

‘I have’, he lower his voice and subtly cleared his throat, ‘a very important package for you.’

*

*

A soul delivered to your door

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PROSE ‘Here’s your husband, doctor Grzegorz Traska’, said Antoni Sielski, pointing to a small vial filled with purple, opalescent liquid. ‘His soul, to be precise.’

My husband could be suspected of many things but having a soul was the least likely. As far as I could tell, he consisted only of his mind and very neglected body.

‘It’s not funny’, I said trying to make my voice sound icy cold. ‘My husband is dead. That’s why I’m asking you to leave now.’

‘But madam’, he protested. ‘This is an agreement he made with our company.’

I looked into his eyes and could not resist the feeling he was completely serious.

He moved several sheets of paper covered with small print over the table towards me.

Each page had the small signature of my husband on it, and the last page included a permit that had undoubtedly been written by him. I refused to study the agreement, choosing a leaflet which seemed to be written for the layman. My eyes moved over several paragraphs about eternal life, a compromise of Christian doctrine of the soul, and finally I found an interesting fragment.

Istvan Vizvary The twentieth century concept of brain as a neuron machine developed towards the end of the century was replaced by a modern neuron-glial doctrine. This allowed to explain the plasticity of brain, memory and illnesses such as schizophrenia. The theory could not, however, explain what is most important for us all and what cannot be fitted into today’s science, namely, the soul.

An explanation and description of this grand phenomenon was brought about only by the undervalued theory of a professor from the Medical University of Bologna, Ignazio Lewontin. It is based on the discovery of subatomic channels filled with purple opalescent liquid in astrocytes.

Professor Lewontin proved that removing of liquid from glial cells means that a man is deprived of what we commonly refer to as a soul. This discovery was a real breakthrough.

‘Lewontin’s plasmodesmata?’, I asked in confusion.

‘Exactly. The liquid in the vial is the content of Lewontin’s plasmodesmata in

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your husband’s brain. Please go through the question and answers section as well.’

Sielski put one more sheet of paper in front of me and handed me a pen.

‘How can you be so sure I will sign it?’, I asked.

‘I honestly hope so. This is your husband after all.’

* ‘Yes?’, I ask the man standing at my doorstep.

‘Mrs Marta Traska?’, he replies with a question presenting a crooked bunch of white carnations. ‘I am a friend of your husband. My name is Tomasz Słomczak.’

He seems to be sniffing the air over my shoulder.

‘Salmon in herbs?’, he says. ‘Grzesiek loved it. Especially with fresh rocket.’

I release the door chain and even though it was supposed to be an evening for two, I let Słomczak in.

I mix carnations with roses and gesture the guest to sit in one of the four empty chairs.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were waiting for somebody’, the guest is looking around the room.

My facial expression should now suggest this is a petty problem.

‘I suppose you’ve come with some issue’, I say. ‘Grzesiek probably owned you money. He always borrowed money from people. Or books.’

‘No, nothing like that. I’d like to give you something. To return it. He’d expect that.’

“Who the hell can that man be?”, I think.

I can see my husband is excited. Clear liquid in the vial is rippled. If he didn’t like Słomczak, it would be unclear. Maybe not to the same degree as in the presence of my mother, but surely slightly unclear.

So he is a friend. My husband’s friend?

Hard to believe it.

‘I’m Marta’, I put out my hand for the guest to shake.

‘Tomasz’, he gently pressed my fingers as if he was afraid they might break. ‘I met Grzegorz at the Institute. We sometimes had lunch together. He talked a lot about you.’

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PROSE Grzegorz is silent. The small particles that glistened for a moment in the vial have disappeared.

‘Well, you must have heard many stories.

It’s a miracle you still wanted to come here. Would you like some wine?’

He nods shyly so I get up and bring a glass. He pours a little wine, so that it barely covers the bottom. Has he come by car?

‘I wasn’t a perfect wife. But now it’s unfortunately too late to make amends.

I can’t make it up to anybody. There’s nobody – I’m lying, but that’s that I suppose.

‘He loved you so much’, says Słomczak looking at me over his glass.

‘I’ve known that for some time.’

‘For some time?’, he is surprised.

‘I found his letters’, I explain. ‘I’ve read them.’

I am looking at the vial and I can see some agitation. I know you shouldn’t read somebody’s letters and you should definitely not boast about it next to their author. I don’t know why he didn’t sent them or who they were for. Surely not me.

Grzegorz didn’t call me his “flower”.

Istvan Vizvary

* My beloved flower!

We spend so little time together even though we need it so much! There’s nobody I can talk to like you, nobody else can listen to me like you. You’d probably be surprised how I can talk. I am also surprised. I can’t understand it. Why does love fade away? Why does passion expire? Why, when the one you love is within your reach, the concord of your souls is gone and patience turns into irritation? Is it only because we cease to appreciate what we don’t miss?

And I still love her as deeply as earlier.

I don’t crave for her ecstasy; I could not enjoy it, but I want to share breakfast and go to the theatre with her. I love her dearly, my flower.

Sometimes I fear our love is passing and its light is fading. That if I don’t meet you in our regular place, that our paths have accidentally split, and not because you were caught in your duties but because you are avoiding me and don’t want to hurt me with your silence and lack of patience for the boring old me. I order

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your favourite dish and eat it alone, trying to imagine you’re sitting next to me. But you don’t touch me accidentally with your elbow or rest your arm on mine.

I miss you and hope you will return to work soon.

Yours, Grzegorz

* I put the vial – amphora, as the representative of the funeral company called it, on the chimney.

For the first few days I studied the purple glistening liquid.

I tried to understand that I believe in something that sounds like the most daring lie in the world: the possible locking of a human soul in a container. I read in the brochure that Professor Lewontin kept a collection of souls in his laboratory – both from volunteer donors, convicts, even animals. No wonder he didn’t get on with the Church. How could a bishop talk to somebody who carries their beloved dog’s soul in the pocket and keeps an extract

from a whale’s brain by the bath? Aren’t there enough madmen on this earth? Why did Grzegorz have to fall into the hands of a cheater?

One evening I saw a spider on the vial.

I approached it with a cloth to chase it away and then for the first time I saw the purple liquid move by itself. I touched the vessel wall with my finger. It was warm, clearly heated. I felt dizzy and could hardly reach the armchair.

The spider didn’t even move. Later, I got used to the fact it was sitting there at night. I also saw that the purple liquid was slowly and gently spinning in its presence.

It moved much faster and more nervously when Grzegorz’s mother came to visit me.

It glistened when my mother-in-law sat at the table and cried, and it turned cloudy when she talked about her beloved son’s childhood days. The liquid didn’t react to the gasman nor to a female colleague from work. But it did react to a male colleague – it turned thicker and moved around lazily.

Three months after the visit of Antoni Sielski I decided to segregate my husband’s clothes into those that were still

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PROSE usable and those that had to be thrown away. When they were all packed into three foil bags and two rubbish bags, I dropped into the armchair in front of the chimney, trying to fight off tears. But they came running down my face and did not feel like stopping. It seemed to go on for hours. They’d stopped when I allowed my attention to finally focus on something that had been trying to attract it for some time.

On that purple thing – opalescent and pulsating with subtle light. The vial over the fireplace was caught in convulsive, abrupt waves that caused pink flashes which slowly faded only to gain intensity again. I approached the fireplace and automatically touched the vessel. The light went out, the tension was gone. The purple liquid calmed down.

Whatever it was that lived in the vessel it could clearly read my emotions, distinguish my husband’s mother from a postman and, on top of it all, it befriended spiders. Why shouldn’t I assume it was the soul of Grzegorz who would never let me kill even the most disgusting eight-legged creature. Instead, he caught them carefully and released in

Istvan Vizvary the staircase so that they could come back the next day.

Was there any harm in believing?

* Q: What help should be provided for a child that accidentally drinks the content of the vial?

A: Gastric lavage should be performed as soon as possible so that Lewontin’s liquid of the deceased does not filtrate into the child’s brain, and the retrieved content should be delivered to the company “New World” for first aid.

* ‘How long did you know him?’, I ask, putting food on Tomasz’s plate.

‘Grzegorz?’

“Well, no. the salmon”, I think but try not to show my lack of patience.

‘Twelve years’, he says after a moment of consideration.

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PROSE ‘So there’s a chance you know more about him than his own wife. Or rather his widow.’

‘The salmon is great, Marta’, he changes the subject in a really smooth way.

‘Grzegorz always appreciated your culinary talents.’

‘And sexual ones?’, I put some mousse on the fork.

Tomasz turns red. He looks as if he wanted to spit out the food onto the plate.

‘He didn’t say I was cold?’

‘We really didn’t talk about things like that’, he’s struggling and looking down.

‘That I was clipping his wings? That I didn’t let him breathe freely? That I controlled him?’

The blush on Tomasz’s face blooms and intensifies. I glance at Grzegorz in the vial.

I have never seen him in such condition.

The liquid thickens and gets thinner, raises its surface and falls down.

‘He never spoke badly of you’, Słomczak declares solemnly. ‘Never, not even once.’

‘Maybe more wine?’, I offer and pour wine into the glasses without waiting for his reply. ‘He never complained to you that his wife didn’t love him?’

Istvan Vizvary “Is it really possible?”, I wonder. “Could he be so loyal?”

* My dearest Flower, Don’t blame me for what I have to tell you.

Don’t think that I don’t appreciate our love or that I don’t regard your appearance and presence in my life as a miracle. But sometimes our thoughts make us so tired that if you don’t say them loud to a living, feeling and thinking person, they consume their owner and sometimes even drive them mad.

I feel lonely.

Lonely in the shell of my body that isolates my thoughts and emotions from feelings and cravings of those whom I love. Those whose thoughts and ideas I would like to share. Not through words that disturb the message not matter how precisely the speaker is trying to formulate it. Even gestures and facial expressions first go through the filter of my capacity to formulate them and then through that of the recipient to understand them: The filter

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of his experience, associations and wishes. When they his reach consciousness, they are already completely different gestures, sounds and expressions. And although I tried to convey my feelings and thoughts as clearly as possible, I remain inarticulate, unspoken and unheard.

Please, don’t get my words wrong. I know you’re trying to understand me and your attempts are infinitely important for me.

Our attempts are the only thing we can give each other if we neglect this carefully woven illusion of mutual understanding.

Because, let’s be honest, every “I understand you”, “I feel sorry for you” or “I feel the same way as you” is a lie spoken in the best faith. Justified and easily understandable but only a lie.

Each of us is lonely. We are born lonely, live lonely and finally die lonely.

So take care of your illusions. They are the only thing that really exists.

Yours, Grzegorz

*

It was after the reading of these several unsent letters that I understood what had been wrong with my marriage over the ten fruitless years. The diagnosis was as sad as simple: I did not love my husband and he would feel lonely even if I loved him.

Even if there was some cure for it, the illness disappeared at the moment when my husband found himself under the wheels of a truck, regardless of the fact that it happened on the crossing and the lights were green.

Of course, it was not an exhaustive and honest conversation because Grzegorz did not die. Or at least not fully. He glistened and rippled on the fireplace, turning more or less transparent depending on the behaviour of the people who visited me in this difficult period.

I sometimes wondered how he knew who was in the room, how he received impulses and why earlier, when he’d had been locked in the ‘shell of his body’, he’d never let me know he would like to have access to my emotions or thoughts.

Or maybe he always tried to do that but I ignored or misread his attempts? Maybe I was cold not only in bed? In bed

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everything could be justified by a lack of warm feelings towards him. But in daily life? You can’t say I didn’t care about him.

I liked him although he sometimes irritated me and thrilled on other occasions. Didn’t he really see it all? Didn’t I really display anything of these feelings?

And finally: why did I learn about it all only now, when it is too late?

* Q: Can you collect the content spilled on the floor into the amphora?

A: It should be done as soon as possible, preferably with the use of a plastic spoon.

Lewontin’s liquid is very fragile and perishes in contact with oxygen and metals.

* ‘And what do you think, Tomasz? Am I cold?’, I put a plate with raspberry cheesecake on sponge on the table. But he doesn’t ask “for a small piece only” as

I thought. He obviously doesn’t care about his weight? He bravely devours the huge portion I gave him and fills the awkward silence after my question with his silent munching.

‘Right, how should you know’, I continue.

I will not ask him to speak with full mouth.

‘I have only treated you to some food.’

Probably I should have noted earlier the fact that a good friend of my husband was fully at ease with a woman dressed in an extremely thin, perfectly see-through shirt with absolutely no underwear. Obviously, I am not a fourteen-year-old but I think my body is in a much better condition than very rusty psyche. Most men, even those wearing clerical collars, would be glancing at my bust now when I’m pretending not to be looking – if only to judge if it is worth glancing at it again.

Tomasz did not glance.

‘I don’t think you’re cold. You’re asking me what I think. You listen carefully to what I’m saying’, he dealt with the problem quite skilfully when he had finally swallowed his food and there was no cake left on the plate.

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So what’s ahead of us? Cognac? Gossip?

Altar announcements?

A fork rings gently on the plate and the guest cleans his mouth with a handkerchief.

‘Delicious’, he praises the cake. ‘Grzegorz did not exaggerate one bit. You’re an excellent cook.’

‘And a baker’, I add.

‘And a baker’, he agrees politely, looking towards plates with the cake.

‘Would you like some more?’

He shakes his head shyly. So he watches his weight after all! I could have asked him if he liked it so that he could not refuse another piece.

‘Maybe some liqueur?’

He sighs heavily as if breaking his own limits and I get up to bring a glass.

* My flower, my love!

I probably won’t send this letter, just like I didn’t send the other ones. Each word we read and hear changes us and I don’t want you to change. For me you are

a perfect man and I would like you to stay this way. Especially my bitter thoughts should not reach you.

Besides, each word of love, each honest confession opens us and exposes, putting our desires and cravings in full daylight. If I told now what I like most about you – what gestures and words, what expressions and reactions, would you resist the temptation to overuse them in order to show your warm feelings towards me and incite the same feelings in me?

Would I know then that you behave the way I like it because you need it or because you want to please me? Tell me what’s most important in love – illusion of full understanding and unity of souls or maybe desperate certainty that happiness we experience, though fragile and transient, is most real of all?

That’s why, even though you’ll never learn about it, I’m grateful that you’re in my life and every day you open my eyes to the beauty of this work.

Yours, Grzegorz

*

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PROSE Surely the sense of failure and waste of ten years of life were not the only results of studying the epistolary achievement of my deceased husband. If not for several details, I could even pretend that they were intended for me – a perfect, virtual me that listens carefully and feels deeply.

But those grammatical details, proving that the object of my husband’s affection was a male, awoke in me something hotter that could not be extinguished with any means I have tested.

Fury.

I have never been intolerant and never segregated people according to their sexual orientation or the colour of their skin but the awareness that my husband has hidden away from me something so important filled me with pulsating, painful anger. How could he expect that I would listen to him and understand him if he has never dared to explain whom he really was.

On the other hand, I was touched and filled with aching sense of loss by the awareness that he remained with me despite all our problems and the fact that I could give him neither the joy nor

Istvan Vizvary satisfaction you expect from somebody you are close with. He must have loved me really hard.

But why me? What was the thing that only I could give him?

This fluctuation continued for a month: when my fury overwhelmed me, I was ready to open the vessel and let the content dry, add the liquid to the sponge cake and bake until it burns, or basically empty the vial to the toilet and watch it change colour in contact with urine.

On a different occasion, when I was crying our wasted lives, my blindness and his pain I indirectly caused, I was ready to drink the purple liquid, hoping it will nestle in my plasmodesmata. And for the rest of my life I will enjoy the union of souls he dreamt about. This dream itself gave me satisfaction when my thoughts skidded off to the side track named “that bastard cheated on me” – spending many years in the brain of person of the sex that he despised so much could be a hell of a torture for him.

But would it really?

Finally, I decided to organise an elegant dinner for two to determine once and for

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all if I was more angry or rather prepared to compensate for his suffering. So I prepared my husband’s favourite dishes and arranged the table the way he always liked it.

And then the doorbell rang.

* ‘This is a special recipe’, I say, filling the glass. ‘He never gave it away to anybody, not even me. He didn’t fully trust me.’

‘It’s impossible. He always spoke highly of you. He would have trusted any secret to you.’

‘Even his special liqueur?’

Tomasz reaches for the glass and asks: ‘And you, Marta? You’re not drinking?’

‘I drink only wine. Liqueur is too strong for me.’

Sielski cautiously tries the liquid, with the edge of his mouth only. I can see clearly that he is stopping himself from drinking it all in one go. “Who are you, Tomasz?”, I ask in my mind. “A student? An alcoholic? A connoisseur?”

‘Don’t stop yourself. It loses the flavour fast. You should drink it from the bottle. Or rather the amphora’, I point out to the emptied vessel.

He looks at me shyly as if I have seen through his shameful desire and empties the glass, pouring the content into his mouth.

I will never forget the delight I saw on his face. Spiritual, deep, absolute.

‘You’ve got some drops of mousse on your shirt. I will clean it fast or you will never wash them away,’ I say pointing to a green stain on his shirt. Or rather on my husband’s shirt. He got it from me some time ago but wore it only once. I never saw it again.

‘Don’t be shy,’ I add. ‘I can give you a tshirt to wear in the meantime.

Unfortunately, I threw away all of my husband’s shirts. I didn’t think I’d need them one day.’

He does not say a word but I think I understand him. He is happy. What can you say at a moment like this?

Why should you say anything?

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Istvan Vizvary

Ten thousand zloty is not a high price for happiness of so many people: my husband and his boyfriend are happy, united. My conscience is clear because I might have wasted Grzesio’s life but I did not waste his death. The owner of “New World” is closer to paying off the credit for another house or whatever he was planning to buy. Maybe even Sielski will get some bonus?

I only feel sorry for the spider. It comes and sits on the amphora as if waiting for something. Maybe it’s because there is one, final purple drop left at the bottom of the vial? I wonder what part of Grzegorz Traska’s soul it is. Maybe the one that is responsible for quiet agreement with eight-legged creatures?

Someday I will probably open the vial and let them unite – the spider and the lover of this species. But for now this love will remain unconsumed. I will let myself keep this one last sign of power for some time.

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Elena Baila Albrizzi

Elena Baila Albrizzi Narratrice poliedrica internazionale / International polyhedral storyteller Based in Cremona - Italy https://www.instagram.com/elena.baila/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1oNrfV1Eg52FQrNGN8Y5Hg

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Elena Baila Albrizzi

#FRESHNESS

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Elena Baila Albrizzi

#DECAY

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Elena Baila Albrizzi

#CHRONOS

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Elena Baila Albrizzi

Sphingidae: transformation - mutation - change

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Elena Baila Albrizzi

Passing

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Elena Baila Albrizzi

Holy Taxidermy

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Elena Baila Albrizzi

Taxidermy of Blue Wings — Tassidermia D’Ali Blu

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Elena Baila Albrizzi

What I see — What I will see

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Elena Baila Albrizzi

the action of bubbling or gloglottare I

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Elena Baila Albrizzi

the action of bubbling or gloglottare II

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POETRY edit. by P. Kasperowicz

Jan Siwmir

"The end of another fairytale" once I tried to look through the keyhole you protested I did not know yet that the rain had to be picked by handfuls although it leaks through the fingers I was late for the first tide I was told to count sand grains I fought for thousands irrelevant things a plan from here to there and the escape attempts have been lost somewhere With pink birds you have shown the way to relief I built a house on the bank of the river I am collecting fruit from the orchard And I repeat my son day by day watch vigilantly in the cloudy sky not to drop a drop because it is a different side other you and other pink birds that are stealing water from my well today

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Aga Jot

The Alphabet of Rose | 160 x 40 cm | neons | 2015 Letters written by the three-year old Rose form the word blueproof. These are the first attempts to write of a child. Over time, her hand will be more and more efficient, she will learn to read and she will go to school. She will acquire principles and definitions, she will learn the discipline generated by the institution. She will be shaped according to bans  and orders. She will meet with the rigor of carefree knowledge, where hard rules of the game will be unambiguous. So that by inserting the guidelines into the pattern, we get a specific, always one and the same answer.

Aga Jot or Aga Piotrowska-Jaworek. Born in 1985 in Zabrze, she lives in Katowice. Visual artist. A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, a doctor of art. A versatile artist, the scope of her practices includes painting, drawing, creating neon signs, objects, installations and video. http://www.agapiotrowska.com/

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Aga Jot

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Aga Jot

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Aga Jot

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Aga Jot

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POETRY edit. by P. Kasperowicz

Piotr Strumyk Stróşyk

"Not everyone dies" more and more heroes appear between us but it's hard to tell about the terror in the dignity of tolerable humiliations among impressive and catchy phrases spoken with the wisdom of a wise man what kind of a monument we buid to the protagonists of forgotten moments right after they happened and the beaten and humiliated have not changed their attitudes and only in the silence of inaccessible places gain new strength to fight the overwhelming dehumanized gibberish what kind of a monument we put to those who despite the dying values keep their lives are noticed less and less but continue building for us THE HOPE

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IT WAS FRIDAY MORNING It was Friday morning. I used to live in a small flat with a red sofa in the kitchen.

She was lying on it. A small girl that always walked covered in paint. She had beautiful olive skin and a pencil stuck into her curly her at all times. When she walked, she balanced her hips in harmony without even thinking of it. When she looked and smiled it felt like images around her slowly dissolve so you end up seeing only her. Her name was Anne and she never officially moved in but somehow she was always there.

When she needed fresh clothes, I used to wait in her studio, which was randomly arranged in the underground of the building she lived in. It was filled with all sorts of art pieces.

Photographs that she took with an old Polaroid. Tiny sculptures made of junk found on the street. Things that to any random eye seem irrelevant, in her gentle hands could finally come to life and reveal their soul. She also used to paint. Every

Arek Spiewak portrait was a perfect resemblance of their models. You could even notice the smallest detail residing in the corner of their eyes. Child, men, women, old, fat, skinny, young. It didn’t matter. As soon as she finished, she used to grab anything that she could and started throwing it at the poor bastards.

“They were too perfect.”

She used to say.

One day, I’d got tickets for some soloists playing at the opera house. I went to pick her up around eight. She was already standing at the door with her mother.

I guessed she wanted to meet the guy her daughter disappears with for so many days. She smiled when I looked at Anne who was wearing a knee length skirt, black tulle blouse, no bra and for the first time ever, red lipstick. We talked for few minutes and left. As we walked I turned back, her mum was still there, looking at us, smiling.

As soon as we crossed the street a skinny, too skinny, tall man approached us. It was her father. He was on his way back from a friend’s house or a bar. He talked a lot, he talked too much. He was staring at us with his big eyes and tried to be cool. He

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PROSE smiled a lot, he smiled too much. I noticed that Anne felt ashamed. She noticed that I didn’t like him. We moved on.

When we came into the auditorium the orchestra was already warming up its instruments. We sat in the middle end.

The lights went down. Silence. Everybody started to clap as soon as the soloist showed up and the concert began.

From melancholic, gentle notes, he smoothly moved into the heavy staccatos accompanied by the sound drums. In all this amazement, when everybody was watching how the virtuoso becomes one being with his violin, I looked at Anne. Her face was blessed with peace.

I put my hand on her knee. Slowly, through her thigh, I moved it under her skirt. She opened her legs and carried on listening.

Arek Spiewak When we sat together in the park, I always told her stories from my past.

When we went to a bar, we didn’t cling to one another but somehow everyone knew.

We never shouted.

It was Friday morning when she stood up from the sofa and said: "I can't do it anymore.” and she left in silence.

THE END

We didn’t talk much on our way back. We just looked at the sky until she got a message. It was her sister. She didn’t want to stay alone that night so I walked her home.

She was at mine again after few days.

She started to visit home more often from then on but the nights were still for us.

When we were in bed she wanted me to hug her tight. She never said it but I sensed that this is what she needed.

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Anita WÅ‚odarczyk

www.anitawlodarczyk.pl https://www.facebook.com/fotografia.anity.wlodarczyk/

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Anita WÅ‚odarczyk

Model: Karolina Karasiuk Make up: Mira Kasprzycka Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

GALLERY

Anita WÅ‚odarczyk

Model: Karolina Karasiuk Make up: Mira Kasprzycka Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

GALLERY

Anita WÅ‚odarczyk

Model: Karolina Karasiuk Make up: Mira Kasprzycka Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

GALLERY

Anita WÅ‚odarczyk

Model: Karolina Karasiuk Make up: Mira Kasprzycka Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

GALLERY

Anita WÅ‚odarczyk

Model: Karolina Karasiuk Make up: Mira Kasprzycka Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

GALLERY

Anita WÅ‚odarczyk

Model: Karolina Karasiuk Make up: Mira Kasprzycka Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

GALLERY

Anita WÅ‚odarczyk

Model: Karolina Karasiuk Make up: Mira Kasprzycka Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

GALLERY

Anita WÅ‚odarczyk

Model: Karolina Karasiuk Make up: Mira Kasprzycka Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

GALLERY

Anita WÅ‚odarczyk

Model: Karolina Karasiuk Make up: Mira Kasprzycka Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

GALLERY

Anita WÅ‚odarczyk

Model: Karolina Karasiuk Make up: Mira Kasprzycka Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

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Anita WÅ‚odarczyk

Model: Martyna Rudkiewicz Make up: Mira Kasprzycka Hair: Ilona Kulesza Techniqua: photomanipulations Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

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Anita WÅ‚odarczyk

Model: Martyna Rudkiewicz Make up: Mira Kasprzycka Hair: Ilona Kulesza Techniqua: photomanipulations Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

GALLERY

Anita WÅ‚odarczyk

Model: Martyna Rudkiewicz Make up: Mira Kasprzycka Hair: Ilona Kulesza Techniqua: photomanipulations Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

GALLERY

Anita WÅ‚odarczyk

Model: Martyna Rudkiewicz Make up: Mira Kasprzycka Hair: Ilona Kulesza Techniqua: photomanipulations Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

GALLERY

Anita WÅ‚odarczyk

Model: Martyna Rudkiewicz Make up: Mira Kasprzycka Hair: Ilona Kulesza Techniqua: photomanipulations Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

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Anita WÅ‚odarczyk

Model: Martyna Rudkiewicz Make up: Mira Kasprzycka Hair: Ilona Kulesza Techniqua: photomanipulations Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

POETRY edit. by P. Kasperowicz

Zdzisława Górska

"The Memory 2003" A homeless man with absent eyesight on the wall in front of a cheap store in the USA Linden New Jersey Wealth pours out of exhibitions and advertisements Muscles of interest rates of banks on anabolics Nothing here from my compassion when the dollar or quarter are for him the only purpose for today He has a knife in his pocket He cuts with him s black rag bag Stolen?

I'm afraid to even come with a donation He kneels in a narrow passage Topping a white cloth with mineral water from a sterile bottle kneeling he washes the new trainers extremely white in black hands Impeccable whiteness of shoes defeats the eyes With the wings of lowered hands I enter into my equally incomprehensible world

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Katarzyna Radzka

Katarzyna Radzka a graphic artist, a painter, a roommate of two Klingons, or cats from space, a graduate of the Graphic Department of the University of Zielona Gรณra (a diploma with distinction).

I love blues, colorful petticoats, perfumes, neatly folded sentences and yellow tulips. I would do more exhibitions, if not for the fact that then you have to go out in front of a group of people and say something significant to them.

I mainly draw portraits, still life, landscapes, sometimes acts. My beloved technique is dry pastels with the addition of acrylic paints, carbon, sometimes ecolines. For children, I paint small acrylic pictures with bunnies and kittens in the main role. I am very demanding in my own work and I think that drawing is only good if it has a considerable emotional charge and is not just another product straight from the factory tape.

I am not afraid of changes - on the contrary, I provoke them more or less consciously. Is it in life or in art. Probably the worst thing that can happen to a man is stagnation and stuck in the shallows of complacency, and then there is no chance for further development. I often see in my drawings that they are changing with me. And I like it. https://www.facebook.com/katarzynaradzkarysunki/

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Katarzyna Radzka

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Katarzyna Radzka

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Katarzyna Radzka

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Katarzyna Radzka

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Katarzyna Radzka

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Katarzyna Radzka

Łąka 31 (Middow 31) Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

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Katarzyna Radzka

Tam (There) Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

INSPIRATIONS

Maria Nowakowska Ever since I remember people have been saying that nothing ever happens in Łódź. I think there has always been something going on.

What is interesting this “something” means different things for different groups of recipients, so if somebody is ambitious enough to take part in all activities... it would not be possible.

However, I understand that in the times before the Internet – because once there was no Internet – it was difficult to follow all events in the city.

If I don’t know that something is going on, I can claim that nothing is happening. Now it is much more difficult to promote such theories. So people promote different ones: that it is more difficult for social activists, hobbyists, people interested in various types of activities to live in Łódź than in other cities. Apparently, I live in a city where nothing can be organized…

If somebody wants to live with that conviction, let them do it. But I have proofs that not only it is possible but also a lot is going on. The examples come from Maria Nowakowska – a person linked to various local organisations, who knows a lot about the EU funds and competitions, as well as the needs of the Łódź people.

She is a social activist who changes

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INSPIRATIONS the image of the city but also the way it is perceived. I admire her energy, her multi-dimensional work as well as the realistic approach that enables her to connect her passion with business.

Let me present Maria Nowakowska.

L&F: Let me begin with inspiration that is the leitmotif of this issue, namely “Change”.

Why did I want to talk to you? Because you are one of the people whom I associate directly with this word. You have changed your life and you are changing the lives of others. You have changed the perception of historical objects and architecture, you are changing the perception of passion and its ties to business, you are changing the perception of this city as such. I can see a lot of changes so let me ask, how did a detail find its place in your life?

Maria Nowakowska: Let me quote Jacques the Fatalist: “How had they met?

By chance, like everybody else.” And it was really so in this case. I am not a historian of art. By education and I did not study architecture, which many people suspect I did. But I have to admit that it is my dream to have dr. inż. arch. [MA in architecture] in front of my name. I think it looks very nice…

L&F: Go on... (laughter).

Maria Nowakowska: (Laughter) Give me some more time. Anyway, I reached that stage through social activity. In 2014

Maria Nowakowska a group called Współdzielnia Staropoleska was started. The first impulse for its creation was a debate organized by the Pinokio Theatre in Kogle Mogle, a café in Legionów Street, which does not exist anymore. A suggestion was made there to meet regularly to promote Stare Polesie, to show it to the people of Łódź, to start social work. I remember that I joined that social group from its second meeting because, let’s be clear, I have little talent for working with communities. In turn, when it comes to promotion, I know what it is about and have the event-making inclination. When I was on my way to the meeting, going along Legionów Street past the Powszechny Theatre, I raised my head and thought: “what a nice detail. Very interesting.

Somebody should take care of it, photograph it.” And then I realised that „somebody should” actually meant „why not me?” And this is how the topic of a detail emerged. I started taking photos of details.

At first, it was a bit crazy because I did not know the density of details in the city. So I thought I would start a fanpage and prepare catalogues with names of streets – all details from 1-go Maja Street, all details from Gdańska Street, all details from Żeromskiego Street.

And I would add photos to these folders. It turned out that there were too many of them, so my idea had to be adjusted and I created folders with exact addresses, including the photos of details from a given building but not the photos of the whole

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Maria Nowakowska

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INSPIRATIONS building because the realization that details are attached to something that can also be photographed came rather late.

At first, this work was quite free but when working on historicism, for example on neoClassical tenements that I don’t like…

I mean it’s not that I don’t like them but just that they are all so much alike. And I began to had doubts if I already had photographed the lion from 31 Więckowskiego Street. Of course there is no lion, it’s just a loose comment. And was it not 41 or 53 Więckowskiego Street? To solve my doubts I bought a map and I crossed the streets I walked. I crossed what I had already photographed and these photos were published on Facebook. Not everything was published there. There are still many photos to be published. At some point, I have more or less covered the whole Stare Polesie.

At that time Współdzielnia Staropoleska got connected with Stowarzyszenie Społecznie Zaangażowani, and I also worked with them. We knew each other privately. And so it all got closer… I noticed that the details reflect some themes: there are mythical figures, animals, plants. The route of animals from Stare Polesie was the first one because everybody knows there is a big horse on Lecznica Pod Koniem so it would be good to start from it. And I started from it.

Together with Społecznie Zaangażowani we published a folder “Zwierzęta Starego Polesia” (Animals of Stare Polesie). Later,

Maria Nowakowska in 2015, the second folder appeared about the plants of Stare Polesie. I remember the day when I started thinking that I might have photographed the whole Polesie already but there must be some details in Śródmieście. You know, for thirty years I lived in the area of PiotrkowskaWschodnia-Jaracza-Narutowicza Streets and I had not seen anything. This is amazing. Now when I think about it I wonder how it was possible. How could I be so blind? Especially, since I lived from the side of Piotrkowska for a long time.

Fascinating! I remember that one day I was going Jaracza Street from Piotrkowska to Wschodnia with my camera and I already knew that the first thing I would when I return home would be to start a fanpage of the details of the Łódź Śródmieście because I found porcelain Egyptian women on the corner with Jaracza. I took out a map and started to cross out consecutive streets. I thought it would be good to put some energy into this project so I applied for artistic scholarship of the President of Łódź because I did not think I could apply for any other. You know that I have no scientific background, which is quite important. My idea was to prepare sixteen routes of details and guide sixteen sightseeing groups through them. Some lecturers, animations and workshops. At that point, I did not think about publishing a book yet. It was supposed to function mainly online. One day Maciek Kronenberg called me. I knew him because we had

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INSPIRATIONS earlier worked together on some touristic projects in INSPRO. He suggested that I should publish a guide with him. We decided to collect money through crowdfounding. I turned out to be a good detail stalker and we managed to collect the money. And write the book.

L&F: This fund-raising activity must have been tiring?

Maria Nowakowska: Yes, it was tiring. But most importantly, it was educating. I got so many different experiences from it. The fund-raiser was a very instructive process.

There were many different people with different approach to money, and thus a lot of emotions. Anyway, we manages to collect the whole amount and publish the book. But let’s go back in time a bit – to the

Maria Nowakowska tours and folders. When preparing them, I was relying on my education, that is the cultural-anthropological- philological background. So I talked about animals against the backdrop of ornaments. But I knew almost nothing about the ornament as such. When I started writing the book, I had to absorb new vocabulary and when you start absorbing new vocabulary it is good to know where a given motif came from. Actually, there was a moment when I completed at least one semester of the studies in history of art within three weeks because I was reading everything I could find on that subject. On the whole, I find it quite embarrassing that I only realized how much I don’t know at that time. And to be honest, the longer I manage the project and the more people are convinced that I have graduated from all possible faculties, the

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Maria Nowakowska

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INSPIRATIONS more I feel there is no escaping it. So yes, I am planning to return to studying, probably to history of art. Mainly to improve my knowledge and grasp the context because it is one thing that I can talk generally about the history of some ornament but if somebody asks me about five best known examples of Neorenaissance in Europe outside Poland…

I will not be able to answer this question as well as I would like to. That is why I try to stress that I am not a scientist, I am not a researcher. I am a promoter and have a limited scope of knowledge that I try to extend. I don’t assume the attitude of an expert who claims that the ornament begins with Nowakowska (laughter).

The tours were successful, the book was a success as well. It was a year ago.

Another problem is that since I started to work on the book and photos, in August last year, the pace of work is lethal. It’s like French Foreign Legion: you describe details, or you die…(laughter). So I detail a lot. I also feel that this project is not publicized well enough. I treat it not as an introduction to history or architecture studies but more as a way of living. In one of my recent interviews it was stated that I promoted detail mindfulness: slow down, take a look around, see how much history has been written around you, that this architecture around you is actually some sort of palimpsest… During the tours when I talk about prints of dog paws I do not use

Maria Nowakowska the word “palimpsest” but I try to smuggle awareness and anthropological meanings.

I have made a difficult decision and applied for a scholarship of the Minister of Culture.

This is the application through which I start on nation-wide naval boarding and visit twenty-one cities in Poland during a year.

L&F: Cool!

Maria Nowakowska: Yes… And the lectures, photos, but mainly I want to collect material because I dream about publishing the second book, an extensive and better designed one, the book that everybody would like to have. It will be about the detail – how to look at it, where to look for it, how to take care of it because I feel this is still very illusive for people. They will be surprised when they see what their cities cover. I have two flagship stories I would like to include in the book and I would like the book to go in that direction. One story of the detail that I would like to tell concerns sgraffito with an elephant from Trzebiatów.

Sgraffito dates back to the 17th century and presents an elephant. The elephant came from Holland because the king of Holland got the elephant as a colonial gift. An elephant ranks highly among these uncomfortable gifts that you never know what to do with them, so the king gave the elephant as a gift to his brother. The brother was not thrilled and sold the elephant because he could do it without any faux pas. And the merchant who bought it show

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INSPIRATIONS

the elephant at markets all over Europe and since the 17th century Trzebiatów hosted a very famous market, he walked to Trzebiatów with the elephant, which is preserved by the sgraffito. The elephant died three years later because the trip to north-east might not have been the best idea for an elephant. And the second story is related to a small town in the south of Poland where we can find an amazing, three-layer detail. On the one side, it presents an antique-like scene in which a figure at the foot of stairs gives out bread to people who are standing under…The author placed in the backdrop a local Neogothic church as the backdrop for the Greek temple because why not? The whole design

Maria Nowakowska

is covered with a Russian sign “house is demined” made with a knife.

And there are many such details in Poland, I think several dozen but you have to find them. The working name for this project is “detalrajza” because I know very little of the south of Poland and would like to get to know it better. Besides, I think “detalrajza” sounds very well with hashtag (laughter).

I have it in the back of my mind and I really want to reach people who may not come to a scientific lecture because the idea to spend two hours with the history of art may seem boring to them. But the suggestion to meet in a café, in a more relaxed and less scientific atmosphere seems acceptable.

A greatest test for me so far was Piwoteka

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Maria Nowakowska

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INSPIRATIONS [a pub in Łódź] where I thought it would be very difficult to draw these people away from the bar and turn their attention to details and myself. But it turned out I was wrong – they listened.

L&F: What are you working on now?

Maria Nowakowska: I am working on a game that will help people get to know details from the Łódź tenements. But it is a big cost to publish such game so this is not a plan for now. It will be a card game with elements of a puzzle. It is not intended typically for gamers but for youth – well, it sounds easy when you don’t talk about it.

L&F: So maybe we should leave this mysterious game for the future. Any other plans?

Maria Nowakowska: I would like to publish this game next year. Apart from it, I would like to start working on the already mentioned nationwide book about details.

And start a vlog, put more effort into Instagram…

This is a subject that can attract recipients in social media and I know it helps a lot.

L&F: Since we’re talking about travelling.

Speakers from different parts of Poland have been invited to DetalFest. All these people deal with details in some way so there are more Maria Nowakowskas…

Maria Nowakowska Maybe they don’t pay attention to the same things but they always look for details.

Maria Nowakowska: They are often people who do interesting things but have little „promoting instinct” so to say. For example Klatkowiec. An enthusiast on the brink of being a maniac. He has been to 120 Polish cities, or maybe even to 160… He enters the staircase looking for some type of decorations and details. He specializes in Art Nouveau but not only. It is a terribly difficult type of work. I specialize in elevation detail – it’s a narrow specialization, the detail is available all day for free and usually I do not need to ask anybody for permission for anything. I took Klatkowiec for a trip around Łódź and he has a very exhaustive system of work: the beginning of a sunny day – the end of a sunny day. When he arrives in a town in summer, he can for several hours… This work calls for a lot of stamina. Anyway, he takes beautiful photos but does not think about publishing them for example in an album. He is not a wealthy rentier who tours Poland in his car to take photos in between running his own business. Klatkowiec travels by train, he does not have a car. It would be great to bring this project to light, to win sponsors and funds for his travels, accommodation, etc. His photos should be published in a decent album. There is also Literołap who works as a graphic designer.

As a hobby he collects typo-details, that is details that rely on fonts. He specializes in

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INSPIRATIONS

Maria Nowakowska

ghosts which are signs that are pretty worn out. He has his own fanpage, work and does not care about being the star of typodetail in Poland. There are also other people that I don’t describe so enthusiastically because they formulate a lot of sexist comments and if I were on a tour with them, then I would quickly leave it. I don’t like it when somebody comments on the appearance of gypsum women, for instance that this one is so ugly that no German woman could ever been like her.

Pitiful. But some of these people think about capitalizing on their work. In Toruń there are enthusiasts and idealists who can serve as a good example. And I really loved the girls from Radom who basically have no local support. The advantage of DetalFest was the opportunity to meet in person. It gave us all a lot of energy because we might be a group of nerds but there are also many real enthusiasts. And the presentation from Włocławek was for me a complete change of perspective. I have always been convinced that this town was only about industry, industry, industry and asphalt between factories. It was a nice surprise to learn that I was wrong even though I was of course slightly embarrassed with my ignorance. It is good that my ideas have been corrected.

L&F: There was one more good thing about the Festival –the workshops. You’ve made it possible for children and adults to make their own details.

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Maria Nowakowska

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INSPIRATIONS Maria Nowakowska: That’s right.

Personally, I only managed ceramic and bookbinding workshops but I also invited a plasterer who organized amazing workshops that covered everything from maintenance to production of details. There were also calligraphy and sgraffita workshops that worked out really well. frottage workshops… I think that next year we might organize a festival that would cover a longer period of time – lecturers during one weekend, workshops over the next weekend, exhibitions during the third one…

Maria Nowakowska L&F: Because here people sewed rather than painted in the streets (laughter)…

Maria Nowakowska: So we should sew these details (laughter)….

L&F: Some time ago we had here a train with knitted sweater (laughter)…

Maria Nowakowska: The exhibition „Łódź artists tracing details” features pillows inspired by ceramic tiles from 222 Piotrkowska Street and a patchwork with peacocks from Traugutta Street. So it is possible to work with textiles.

L&F: A month with DetalFest!

Maria Nowakowska: A fest is a fest (laughter).

L&F: Maybe you could link it to Zielone Smaki Łodzi?

Maria Nowakowska: Well, there was a culinary accent, a small one because it was not the scale I was thinking of. Maybe in the future we could cover restaurants along Piotrkowska Streets and organize stands for people sketching out architectural details, so that you could see people drawing details throughout the whole weekend. On the whole, it is typical for Łódź that you cannot see artists with easels working in the city space, like in Kraków for example.

L&F: But these are artists of a different type.

Maria Nowakowska: And sometimes they don’t want to collaborate...

L&F: To sum up, one more aspect of your activity. Recently, Rynek Włókniarek has appeared.

Maria Nowakowska: Yes, this is the activity that I started four years ago and finally I have manager to finalize it. I was very moved when I had the opportunity to say a few words at the official opening on Sunday. It was so emotional. At one of the meetings, I was approached by a lady who gave me a framed photo of her mother with her name and information where she had worked, in which hall. And she said: “This is

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INSPIRATIONS my mum. She is still alive and she asked me to show you this photo so that you remember her because she was a textile worker as well. And maybe you can prepare a project on the people who had worked here. This photo is for you.” And it was so touching on the one hand, but on the other hand… it is a big burden. This is a kind of obligation and you have a dilemma because I would love to take some time off from any obligations but I think it’s not possible (laughter).

L&F: I can understand that but the world changes thank to such obligations.

Maria Nowakowska Włókniarek” was already there. It is happening. The Internet can already see it (laughter).

L&F: I am very happy it is so. I would like to wish you success with your plans and strength to deliver them. And do continue to inspire us! https://www.facebook.com/lodzkidetal/ https://www.facebook.com/tujestdetal/ Photos by Maria Nowakowska

Maria Nowakowska: Oh, the world has already changed. Just imagine that I post photos from the opening on Instagram and I wanted to add the location but “Rynek

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Maria Nowakowska

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PROSE

Anna Grzanek

HAPPINESS ‘Enter your PIN’, we heard a nearby voice at the very moment my friend Witek said: ‘It’s disgusting how money makes the world go round!’

I looked around. We were walking through a shopping mall full of feverish women carrying their shopping bags, hosts and hostesses promoting various products, gossiping friends and suspicious-looking couples that could consist of either fathers and daughters, or men and their mistresses.

The voice that attracted my attention came from one of the stands located in the central section of the main passage. You know, where they usually sell sweets, bank services or beauty products. But this very stand was different than the ones I came across so far.

A muscular, bearded man in a suit was sitting at the desk with a tiny, pretty assistant on his side. The banner ‘YOUR DREAM AT A GOOD PRICE’ was set up on one side, and ‘WISHES FOR EACH POCKET’ on the other.

‘Corruption, taxes, simony and nepotism wherever you look’, continued irritated Witek.

‘Just look at the papers! This crisis will kill us all. Hey, are you listening to me at all?’ he snapped seeing my absent-minded expression. His eyes followed mine and he waved impatiently.

‘Yes, I’m listening.’

Witek continued his argument and I allowed him to give vent to his frustration. He had just been sacked so no wonder he kept on complaining. We ate together in the food court, he complained some more, and then we split and went our own ways. He went to the parking, to his car, and I went back to the main entrance, to wait for the tram.

The bearded man was still sitting at the stand, talking to a young blonde with a wide smile on his face. The girl looked slightly confused but full of hope. I moved closer. I wanted to approach them and ask what they were offering but for some reason I didn’t. I stopped the blonde girl who was already heading to the exit.

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PROSE

Anna Grzanek

‘I don’t know’, she replied slightly fearful. ‘I don’t know yet. We’ll see...’

And she went away, leaving me even more intrigued.

I went back home, fed the cat and sat in front of my TV to match a game. For me it was a synonym of freedom and comfort – beer, peace of mind, a purring factory on my knees, Lewandowski balancing on the screen. Could I possibly wish for anything more?

*** Oh, yes. I could.

Being in a hurry to get to work next day, I started thinking about the bearded man and banners with the words ‘dream’ and ‘wishes’ highlighted with italics and sharp colours.

Don’t get me wrong. I thought my life was good. Maybe my work was moderately satisfying, but at least it was secure and well-paid. I travelled the city by tram because it was faster and I didn’t have to get my car out. I could afford to a two-room, decently arranged comfortable apartment and food for my cat. I could also afford to live without credit and spend two weeks every year in Croatia or Majorca. The point was that you always want more, right? This is quite an effective development mechanism but it doesn’t help you get peace of mind.

And I also missed something, so much so that sometimes in the middle of the night I felt that the longing will burst my heart and lungs, and someone will have clean it all up.

Although I fought it and tried to put such thoughts aside, after a week I gave up.

At 4 pm I close the office and went to the shopping mall. I was welcomed by the standard noise, crowds and specific smell of cleaning products, sweat, perfumes and money.

I consider shopping malls very harmful to your health by the way.

The stand was still there, although I subconsciously suspected it would have disappeared by now. There was a new banner by the box saying ‘SPECIAL OFFER – TWO WISHES AT Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

PROSE

Anna Grzanek

THE PRICE OF ONE ONLY TO THE END OF THE WEEK*’. Of course, the cheats put an obligatory asterisk and some small print at the bottom.

I had to wait for my turn because the muscular bearded man was talking to an old man with shaky hands. Strangely enough, I did not hear a single word of their conversation even though they were sitting next to me. In the meantime the assistant offered me some tea.

I accepted it, thinking that these cheats will at least be one Lipton tea bag worse off.

Much to my surprise, it was not Lipton, nor any other familiar tea brand. The liquid was hot as hell and at the same time refreshing as lemon sorbet. It tasted great. I’d never drunk anything so good in my life.

Still waiting, I scrutinised the bearded man. From a close distance his posture was even more impressive. The man gestured vividly, ran his fingers through his thick hair and smiled all the time.

The old man who was sitting by him took a thick roll of money from the inner pocket of his coat with his shaky hands. The put an equally shaky signature on the document presented by the bearded man and money changed hands. The client got up, bowed and left.

I did not understand at all what type of transactions were done here. Well, whatever the bearded guy and his pretty assistant were trading, it surely was not cheap.

It was only now that the stand manager turned his eyes to me. He had very light and very blue eyes, hypnotising ones. The voice was low and warm and encouraged trust – a perfect salesman.

‘Do you like it’, he asked pointing to the cup in my hands, which totally threw me off my balance.

‘It’s very good’, I replied, abashed.

‘Heavenly plantations’, said the bearded man, obviously pleased. ‘Nothing can beat them.

We sell leaf tea over there’, he pointed to one of the shops down the alley. ‘Just in case you’re interested. It’s highly recommended!’

I felt ever more confused and unreal.

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PROSE

Anna Grzanek

‘That’s not what I came here for,’ I said. But the tea was delicious so maybe it was worth considering…

‘And what did you come here for?’, asked the bearded man, smiling warmly. I was silent so he continued. ‘Well, let’s start from the beginning. To avoid any doubts. My name is Jerzy Szatan and this is my secretary, Regina. I run a small dream-trading company.

A niche in the market, you know. Sooner or later somebody had to use it.’

I burst into laughter. I knew it wasn’t polite but I couldn’t help it. I don’t know what I found funnier – his name or what he said later. The bearded man, unshaken and still smiling, waited.

‘There’s nothing funny in my name’, he reassured me after a moment, as if reading in my mind. ‘I just want my clients to understand what they are doing.’

I froze, half-amused, half-anxious. The guy was obviously talking rubbish. Was he deranged?

‘Not really, Jarek… Can I call by your name? This is not a joke nor a trick. I don’t plan to hide anything. I’m only trying to earn my living like everybody else.’

I looked down at a name tag that I left in my office. How the hell…? Oh, well…

‘You’re trying to tell me you’re Satan and you’re trying to sell people a chance to fulfil their dreams?’, I asked, trying to disguise my sudden urge to flee with mockery.

‘That’s right’, replied Jerzy Szatan, calm as always.

‘In return for… human souls?’, I tried to joke again but it did not work very well. He shook his head.

‘No way. In return for money. Today many souls go to hell with no special effort on our part,’ he explained seriously. ‘Money is a totally different matter. Everybody needs it, even me. So I decided to widen my scope of activity. We sell real dreams for real money, no hidden costs’, he laughed. ‘I regard it as a fair deal.’

I looked around but nothing has changed. A free-standing box was still surrounded by streams of people; there was music playing in the background, sales people were promoting their goods, girls were drawing money from their boyfriends and sponsors were sponsoring. Well, that’s life.

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Anna Grzanek

From time to time somebody stopped by Szatan’s stand to study the content of posters.

‘Do you tell it to everybody?’, I asked just to say anything.

‘Well, I talk differently to different people,’ he assured me, smoothing his beard. ‘Because everyone is a different person, you may want to admit, with their individual needs. You for example are trying to understand it. Some people ask no questions, make a deal and run away as fast and as far as they can. They don’t want to know. Just like this nice gentleman before you. His wish was to die exactly a month from this day, in his sleep. Of course, he will go to hell for it but he’s happy because his wife has been waiting for him there for the past twelve years. And the girl you talked to last week had been sitting here for three hours or so before she made up her mind. Yes, I do remember you’, added the bearded man when he saw my expression. ‘I notice and remember everyone who can be my potential client.’

I was staring at him in silence, my mouth half open. After a moment, just to win some time, I took a sip of tea. Now, when it was cold, it paradoxically warmed me inside. Probably no words could convince me like this tea.

I thought about my savings I’d been putting aside something in the bank for a rainy day for several years. Maybe it was not a rainy day but would I ever get a chance like this again?

Jerzy Szatan was sitting in silence, knowing he had to give me some time. That rascal was an expert in his trade.

‘But this is still slightly unfair’, I observed. ‘You’re opening new possibilities for people who can afford it.’ I thought about Witek, who had been so suddenly sacked, as I said it. And about the rest of our society who are generally screwed and would never be able to afford anything precious. I was quite surprised because normally I never had such emphatic thoughts coming my way.

‘Well, that’s karma’, the bearded man shrugged his shoulders. ‘This is no charity. But they offer free miracles in the church and you’re welcome to go there… Yet, considering how often they occur, there’s nothing free even there.’

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Anna Grzanek

I smiled wryly.

‘Probably.’

‘Know what? I like you. I like that you’re asking me questions. I will give you an extra twenty per cent off. Deal?’

‘Ha…’ I made the decision probably already at the moment when I asked beautiful Regina for a second cup of tea. I pondered on the matter for the next half hour and finally I used the special offer ‘two wishes for the price of one.’ The asterisk referred to the condition that one can get two wishes at the same time only if they come from the same price category. And obviously not the top level wishes because you always have to pay extra for large-scale miracles.

‘And one more thing’, I present my condition before planting my signature. Not with a fountain pen and blood but with a red pen carrying the logo of Szatan’s company, Helvetti.

‘You told me that the old guy would go to hell for buying the wish.’

‘Oh no’, the bearded man reassured me. ‘We punish only for fulfilling some dreams! Your dream is actually neutral. But in his case the wish to die stands for suicide, you see.’

‘Oh, right.’

I thought again, considering all pros and cons. I drank the last drops of the heavenly tea just to gather my courage and finally I signed the sale/purchase agreement.

I took a card from my wallet and prepared mentally for the moment when, after I push several keys, my bank account will not only show a perfect zero but I will actually be in the heavenly red. But what the hack, you only live once.

Szatan gave me the terminal and with a wide smile stretching to his wisdom teeth said: ‘PIN and green button please.’

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PROSE

Anna Grzanek

‘Honey, I’m leaving!’, I shouted to the depths of my apartment. I was just about to shut the door behind me when I changed my mind. I ran to the kitchen to kiss Kinga on the back of her neck and only then did I run out laughing.

As I threw rubbish into the bin, I thought how happy I was. My life was still simple and organised but how much more perfect!

I wished for the following things: to have a stable, well-paid job for the next forty years and, some time during the next year, to meet and fall in love with a woman who would love me too. I paid a lot of money for it but you know what? It was worth it. I don’t regret it.

Of course, I had to ask for stable employment. I got rid of all my savings and had to make sure I have enough money to pay my rent by the 10th each month and afford bread and sausage. Because for a longer time after this incident I lived on the cheapest food and my cat on the most common canned meat.

I calmly kept on commuting to work by tram, I did what I had to do there and went back home. I was waiting.

Finally, after nearly eight months of waiting, when I managed to was not in the red any more but still could not afford anything, I saw her. I knew it was her. Maybe not a perfect beauty but with a beautiful silhouette, smiling and thrilling.

I fell in love like a kid and made a complete fool of myself at the very beginning. But I managed to win her. Kinga started to treat me seriously only when I proved to her that I could afford dinner in a restaurant, gold earrings and a family car (payable in instalments), but this is life.

The woman of my dreams married ma and I was still earning good money is a barely satisfying work. I got from Szatan all I paid for. Our customer is our master.

Sometimes I went to the shopping mall where the well-built bearded man was still running his “small-scale business”. I never approached him to talk, say thank you or chit-chat. But I saw people sit at the table, talk, negotiate, argue, leave, return, sign and pay. Watching this process somehow gave me pleasure.

One day I saw Witek approach the bearded man. It was about two months after I made Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

PROSE

Anna Grzanek

my deal. Szatan did not forbid me to talk about what had happened to me. On the contrary, he regarded it as a free promotion. So I told my story to my friend as a sort of anecdote about a guy in the shopping mall who cheats money from people promising them to make their dreams come true. And Witek immediately sold his car, took mortgage and fulfilled his dreams so effectively that I never saw him again. He did not even say goodbye.

I watched men and women, old and young, pretty and ugly making their deals with Szatan. Each visit at the shopping mall only confirmed I made a good decision. The rustle of money was comforting and the low, warm voice tempting to sign the agreement was even more comforting. Somewhere deep inside I was convince life cannot be so great and I will be punished for it. But why should I? I did not do anything wrong. You should chase your dreams at all cost. And if sometimes I saw red light in Kinga’s eyes or felt the ends of filed horns on her head when I petted her, what did it matter? Happiness can have more than one, earthly dimension.

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Adam Topolski

I have always been fascinated by people snd photographs out of focus.

Passers-by in the street are to me like blurred photos. It is the contact, conversation, working together that make me change my point of view. A person becomes more clear, concrete, human. They are no longer an element of the background, they become the main character.

Those who decided to pose for you are: Rakel, Sif, Claudia, Stela, Gauti, Tomas, Dusan.

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Adam Topolski

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Adam Topolski

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Adam Topolski

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Adam Topolski

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Adam Topolski

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Adam Topolski

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Adam Topolski

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Adam Topolski

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Adam Topolski

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Adam Topolski

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Adam Topolski

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Adam Topolski

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Adam Topolski

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Adam Topolski

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POETRY edit. by P. Kasperowicz

Magdalena Zawadzka

"The Request" Today I am asking you to forgive me These continuous postal harassments.

This is the only form of a contact That can save my life.

When I stay between dreams and reality, When by thoughts I want to move the universe only I can see it a grimace of a bored smile on your face.

I'm walking down a dark corridor of empty, bottomless imagination I have no illusions anymore I'm stuck between two stages of life.

Therefore, please forgive me These continuous postal harassments I'm not asking for anything anymore, I do not want to know anything Late, but I have understood.

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Katarzyna Szyszko

https://www.facebook.com/fotografiaKasiaSzyszko/

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Katarzyna Szyszko

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Katarzyna Szyszko

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Katarzyna Szyszko

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Katarzyna Szyszko

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Tossing Meathood

Łukasz Ociepa

1.

[L&F]: What kind of food did you like the most as a child? [Łukasz Ociepa]: My starter for many years, was a milk soup, regardless of the season with warm milk, cornflakes and a spoon of cocoa, until there appeared more milk flakes — I went crazy! It was like a ritual. I think I had the same breakfast with the same cereal for a couple of months. And when the flakes were over, I just had to give up on the proper breakfast and to eat an ordinary sandwich. What was not easy.

[L&F]: And what you didn’t like to eat when you were a kid? [Łukasz Ociepa]: Most of the photos and VHS recordings indicate that I liked to eat. A lot, often, no matter what.

But I always disliked the liver, the tripe soup and the knuckle. I was not a fan of minced pork, broad bean or spinach. I think the issue of serving and taste was important.

[L&F]: When have you started and why to think about what you eat? [Łukasz Ociepa]: High school was a time of comparison, determination of group membership or values scale. Quality for me was always more important than quantity. The maturation and support I received from my godmother influenced the development of my body awareness, the nutrition rules, or fit lifestyle.

[L&F]: Well, do you remenber what was the prevailing point that led you to the vegetable kitchen? [Łukasz Ociepa]: Love... That showed me what and how, and that it is possible to survive not eating meat! The relocation to Warsaw has also influenced the speed of my decision on diet changes.

[L&F]: Who supported you in your diet decisions?

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Tossing Meathood

Łukasz Ociepa

[Łukasz Ociepa]: At home I had a lot of slack, probably thanks to good grades and general lack of trouble. Also there was a time, that in the refrigerator there was a shelf with a sticker with my name, so that no one else did not pick up what I wanted to use. Thanks to the casual works I could save on proper supplementation or exercise equipment.

[L&F]: What is the most important thing in the plant based diet? [Łukasz Ociepa]: Lightness of being. From the time I left eating meat, I feel lighter — and I do not mean weight, but rather something else — maybe less digestive load? I do not know.

[L&F]: What do you consider as the biggest challenge of the plant based diet? [Łukasz Ociepa]: Honestly, the hardest thing is to give up the products that you had used for years. I rather suggests a gradual resignation and replacement of these things with vegetable equivalents. Otherwise, we may feel confused and, as a result, disturb our diet or stop eating a variety of full-fledged meals, wondering what to do now!

[L&F]: And what did you miss most? How did you replace it? [Łukasz Ociepa]: It is hard to say, as the spectrum of flavors I have discovered is much more valuable than what I left in the past.

[L&F]: What type of reaction did you experience when you switched to the plant based diet? [Łukasz Ociepa]: Rather neutral. Obviously, the questions — I am planning to return — are often. On family occasions I have direct access to the kitchen or some dishes are specially marked with green straws <you can eat that!>. Among friends there is a certitude that whatever I prepare will certainly be delicious. Sometimes I feed them with various vegetable delicacies. Recently, I have also been running lunchboxes.

[L&F]: So people can order food and let go of the cooking? What is most popular in such lunchboxes?

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Tossing Meathood

Łukasz Ociepa

[Łukasz Ociepa]: That's right! Because I like to cook and I cook for myself, so I was asked by some friends to cook also for them. As we work close to each other, they receive a ready-made lunch every day. Every month, a new person appeares, and as for now I’m preparing 4 portions daily. As for popularity — all the fun is that I got the allergic guidelines, which is not allowed. The weekly menu I usually prepares on Sunday and sometimes I post on Lost in the Kitchen blog. On the other hand, I do not reveal that to my gourmets, to give them a delicious surprise every day.

[L&F]: And what type of reactions do you face today? [Łukasz Ociepa]: My lifestyle is my private matter, also my closest friends do not question my choices. They always stand behind me, supporting me.

[L&F]: What makes in your opinion vegan or vegetarian diet become fashionable? [Łukasz Ociepa]: I do not know if fashionable is a good description. I think it's the result of mediocre fit lifestyle, dietetics, little credit to artists and celebs. All that talking about nutrition issues in breakfast television, culinary programs, or on the internet. If you look for some information, you will surely find it there.

[L&F]: You are leading a project, which part of is linked to the promotion of a healthy diet — you encourage veganism, presenting visually fine dishes. The question is what do you like to cook? [Łukasz Ociepa]: Personally, I have the feeling that my breakfasts and soups are the best.

I have some amateurs of my hummus. Although my recipe differs from the original, it was also appreciated by my Indian friend Rameeza from Bombay.

And Lost in the kitchen is one of the five elements of The Floating Maze Project, a multiartist project that combines all my interests and skills into a logical whole. It is based on the postmodern social theories and Ingarden's philosophy.

I live in the belief that the most important thing in life is to be happy and to live in harmony with my needs. Me myself, I have found my place on the stage as a singer, musician. The moment of energy exchange between the band and the audience, is the moment that gives me the biggest satisfaction, or in other words the feeling of happiness.

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Tossing Meathood

Łukasz Ociepa

The strongest emphasis in FMP is put on music, which is a constant element of the other elements of the project.

[L&F]: Do you have any "typical" foods, for which you are recognized? [Łukasz Ociepa]: You have to ask my friends... Some of them admitted "to eating" the monitor screen or the display on the phone while scrolling through the pictures of my dishes. For me, as I have already mentioned it is a lifestyle, norm, everyday life. I’m not able to act in a different way. The food must be a) healthy, b) tasty c) aesthetically pleasing.

[L&F]: And what flavors do you consider your own? What do you like to mix? [Łukasz Ociepa]: In the kitchen of five transformations it is difficult to give up any of the flavors, definitely dominates in my kitchen a sharp taste, the second taste is a complement, but it depends on the dish. The most sensational mixes are created by chance. I experiment a lot in the kitchen, in the end the first person who tries new dishes is me. So if I wasn’t tasty for me, I would certainly not repeat it, and for sure I wouldn’t give it to someone to eat.

[L&F]: Ok, the last question: If I have asked you to cook something right now, for any person reading your words, what would that be? [Łukasz Ociepa]: One of the regular breakfasts — a cake (crumpet) that can be served sweet with fruit, seasoned or spicy with vegetables. For this cake we need the following ingredients: — coconut oil, — vegetable milk, — buckwheat bran, — banana, — rice flour, — salt, — ground ginger, — lemon — turmeric.

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Tossing Meathood

Ĺ ukasz Ociepa

Buckwheat bran should be ground in a grinder coffee grinder for example â&#x20AC;&#x201D; unless you have a hiperblender (which I do not have).

We add x grams of rice flour to a bowl, we add banana (as I like to put it in the denominator), vegetable milk and a tablespoon of coconut oil.

We blend it together.

We need to add a pinch of ginger and a pinch of salt, a few drops of lemon, x grams of ground buckwheat bran with a pinch of turmeric.

We blend it once again.

The cake is ready.

Now we fry it on both sides like any other pancake.

Next I usually stuff cranberry, raspberry, banana and maple syrup, plus some mint leaves.

You can also make a spicy cake, spreading it with horseradish sauce and add grilled vegetables to the top, sprinkling them with blackcurrant.

I feel like the saliva begins to overproduce to the very thought of what I could do with such a cake...

https://www.facebook.com/lostinthekitchensite/ ________________ Are you a plant-eater?

Do you fight with the stereotype of a carnivorous man?

Tell us about your experience!

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Szymon Jobkiewicz

https://www.instagram.com/szimi82/ https://www.facebook.com/szymonjobkiewicz/

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Szymon Jobkiewicz

Modelka: Anna Juniewicz

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Modelka: Anna Juniewicz

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Modelka: Anna Juniewicz

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Modelka: Ewelina

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Modelka: Izabela

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Modelka: Kalina Piotrowska

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Modelka: Kalina Piotrowska

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Modele: Kamila GryguÅ&#x203A; i Dawid Hemke

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Modele: Kamila GryguÅ&#x203A; i Dawid Hemke

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Szymon Jobkiewicz

Modele: Kamila GryguÅ&#x203A; i Dawid Hemke

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Szymon Jobkiewicz

Modele: Kamila GryguÅ&#x203A; i Dawid Hemke

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Szymon Jobkiewicz

Modelka: Katarzyna

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Modelka: Katarzyna

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Modelka: Katarzyna

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Szymon Jobkiewicz

Modelka: Malwa

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Modelka: Malwa

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Modelka: Malwa

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Szymon Jobkiewicz

Modelki: Malwa i Ola

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Szymon Jobkiewicz

Modelki: Malwa i Ola

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Modelka: Ola

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Szymon Jobkiewicz

Modelka: Monika Markowska

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Szymon Jobkiewicz

Modelka: Sonia Ziobro

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Szymon Jobkiewicz

Modelka: Veronica Gemini

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Szymon Jobkiewicz

Modelka: Veronica Gemini

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Szymon Jobkiewicz

Modelka: Veronica Gemini

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Szymon Jobkiewicz

Modelka: Weronika

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PROSE

Noncommunicating vessels All things alive in this world should be in a state of separation.

Don’t you think this sentence is beautiful?

No? Wait a moment, I’ll try to explain everything.

I believe that the world would be much better if each of its elements existed separately. Symbiosis, relation or partnership are only an appearance or mere illusion that does not reach its goals.

Really. All links between living creatures on our small planet resemble enforced roles to be performed. Don’t you think that’s the way it is? I believe that coexistence is only an empty word; a thing that does not have any meaning or justification. A defective process that brings about only damage, a hungry tick

Damian Bralewski digging deep into the skin of your warm body…

Damn, I’ve got an awful headache…

I might have got off to a bad start. Let me explain it in a different way.

Right at the beginning of my life I was convinced that there were no things in the world that co-existed peacefully. I was born in a small, neglected town neighbouring a grand city. My life as an unplanned child was not easy. Before I was taken from my parents, I’d been through difficult times, which still haunt me in my dreams today. My father was an alcoholic, my mother a drug addict, and me – a small, scared boy hiding in the corners of his own house. Do you think this relationship could be called a family?

Was this link good?

Well…

After my own father sent me several times to the hospital, and my mother tried to put “her little baby” to sleep in a hot oven, I realised I could only trust myself and that stability and safety are pitiable myths.

At the age of ten, I ended up in a social nursing home whose facility was located

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Damian Bralewski

several kilometres from my old house.

Apparently, after two years in prison, my parents tried to contact me but as a child I was not eager to do that (finally, the court banned them from contacting me).

I remained in the social nursing home until I was of legal age. Over the nearly eight years of my stay there I managed to make only one “friend”. I was then (and probably still am) a loner who preferred to keep his distance and stay away from others.

I remember children from the facility were mocking and bullying me because of my interests. Even when I was fifteen, I spent hours in a local library, browsing through pages of books and registers concerning the anatomy of humans and animals, and various post mortem examinations. When seeing that, I was called “a creep”, “a pervert” and “a psycho”. I couldn’t understand it.

interested in things other than drinking and taking drugs; he loved science.

I remember at some point I hoped I had found somebody to talk to about basically everything. Somebody I could finally trust; you know, the so-called soulmate.

Unfortunately, I was wrong.

The only person who didn’t bother me was a boy who, just like me, had been saved from a dysfunctional family at the last moment. They called him ‘Brainy’. We became friends because he accepted and understood my hobby. The fourteen-yearold ‘Brai’ was an open and curious boy,

Almost two weeks later, my secret laboratory was invaded by nearly all the teaching staff, all the kids and the headmaster. I remember that one of the care-givers cried when she saw me.

I didn’t understand her behaviour.

Our friendship did not even last a year.

Brai’s behaviour changed when I told him about my tiny secret. One afternoon I told him that I’d organized something like a laboratory in one underground basement of our facility, where I tested that bodies of animals I came across. He didn’t want to believe me. When he saw my mini lab with his own eyes, he froze still. I thought he was happy, but instead of fascination I saw fear and anxiety in his eyes. Brai hurried away with some stupid excuse. He swore on his life that he would never tell anybody about it.

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PROSE It turned out that Brai had ratted me out to our main caregiver. After this incident, he found new friends and started taking drugs (like most of boys from the facility).

We lost touch completely. One day he even left some drugs in my locker, trying to divert the care-givers’ suspicions away from himself but he didn’t succeed. Over the next six months, Brai changed beyond recognition,. The oath he’d made when seeing my secret lab turned out to be lethal for him. At the age of sixteen, Brai died in the facility due to drug overdose.

I was punished for my antics with six months of home arrest and two years of psychological supervision. I have never found any other friend because after this incident, I stopped looking for one.

I realized that friendship means another bad connection, which is solely a faulty inter-human link.

Eh… The headache is slowly becoming unbearable…

I am sorry I’m rushing but I’m just trying to highlight some issues. Anyway, I was surprised, and I am still surprised, why I got punished (you know, for running my

Damian Bralewski secret laboratory). Just tell me, did I do anything wrong?

Many of many caregivers from the facility were worried about my future. Against their conviction, I passed my graduation exam very well when I turned nineteen and I was accepted for medical studies with many young people. During my three years of studies I lived in the university dormitory. I lived on the small salary of a meat processing assistant at a butcher’s that cooperated with numerous big stores.

I did not meet many people during my studies. I preferred to stay on the side, away from any parties or other adventures. I spent most of my free time in the library or laboratory. I also liked (and still like) reading extreme horror stories.

My work at that time did not give me a lot of money but still I approached it with a smile on my face. When processing meat (just like at the university lab), I acquired a lot of interesting information related to properties and composition of bodies of various animals. To be honest, I found it really fascinating. All through my studies, I was pointed at and called ‘doctor dagger’. I did not know if all the mockery

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PROSE by my colleagues come from their excessive interest in medicine and pathology or basically it was all about my very good grades. I did not care really.

I completed my studies with the best grades of the whole year. My professors saw a promising future ahead of me…

Following my lecturers’ advice, I started training as a doctor in a large district hospital. Unfortunately, this type of work did not fit me at all (i.e. working with living and very talkative people). After two months of this torture, I resigned from the course and applied to the section working in the morgue. They accepted me. This job turned out to be my dream one. The new position gave me a chance to rummage in humans (not only in animals) and they even paid me for it. Do you get it? What had earlier been a vague possibility for me have at last became real.

Great! – I thought then.

During my two-year-long career of a pathologist, I met only one woman (the first ever in my life). I fell deeply in love with her. After a year, I even thought about proposing to her (I believed she felt something for me too). I could do anything

Damian Bralewski for her. For the first time I felt this strange, pleasant… itching in my hands. You know, the positive vibrations I had never experienced before. I even thought that maybe I had lived so far unaware that such good ties existed in the world… that …that somebody wanted to be with me because I was who I was…

But I was so wrong, my dear friends.

This bitch was all the time stealing my money and sleeping secretly with other guys. Just like some prostitute…

When I learned what my ‘beloved’ was doing, I terminated all contact with her and decided I never wanted to have any relations with any other woman. At that point I realized that all ties and relations present in our world are defective, bad and weak. Just like the ones I experienced in my life… You get it? These ‘ties’ remind me of human body. They are weak, helpless, deformed… Maybe this is why I like my work so much. Segmenting corpses makes me feel at ease. When I separate individual parts of a human body during autopsy, I feel great relief.

I believe each part of a human body

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PROSE should be separate the way I am separate in my life. Now you understand what I meant at the beginning of this speech?

Any ties, relations, symbioses or partnerships are mere illusion and lie. To my mind, such things don’t really exist and if they do, they are present only in a toxic form.

I cannot stand it… Wait a moment, I have to take a pill. I think I have one blister in the pocket of my apron…

Done.

You might have noticed I keep on complaining about strong headache, right? Since I have mentioned it several times, I feel obliged to explain briefly why it is so. Just listen.

Yesterday night I dealt with a few petty issues and came back to my apartment.

When I finished watching several TV programmes, I started to get bored (it often happens to me recently). And so I went to a nearby bar for a few drinks.

I have been repeating the ritual of getting drunk at least three times a week for almost two years and that is the cause of my regular headache. Usually, all my trips

Damian Bralewski to the bar are similar. I get blotto, sitting alone at the bar. After some time, the bartender wakes me up, helps me into a taxi and then I wake up in the morning with a horrible hangover.

Yesterday that scheme got slightly changed.

When I was already slightly drunk a beautiful, young woman joined me. She bought me a few drinks and started flirting with me…

She reminded me of somebody I know.

We had a very good conversation and during the whole chat I felt I had already seen her face… But I could not recall where…

After a few more drinks, my head picked up pace and I noticed that my interlocutor was bore a strong resemblance to my former girlfriend. She even bore the same name. Wioletta… Weronika…

Unfortunately, I passed out at some point and don’t remember what I did later.

I remember only some fragments. Our laughter in a crowded, noisy street, a kiss, and that I later took the excited girl into a dark alley or some corridor…

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Damian Bralewski

Eh… and that’s where the headache came from…

I am in the morgue now. I came to work earlier today because this damn headache did not let me sleep anyway. The room is chilly and the only sound you can hear is the clicking of a broken hospital fluorescent lamp. At this moment, there are only three tables in the room with three corpses and me. Today I will be working at post C. An interesting case.

Usually, complete bodies end up in our morgue only to get segmented by me. And this case is the opposite. Apparently, the human body I am supposed to cut today had already been sliced into tiny pieces…

You know what? I have just raised the cover and saw the person under it…

This is the woman from the bar I met yesterday…

Her body resembles a huge puzzle now…

I feel slightly strange looking at her but you know what?

This woman looks much better now than when I saw her for the first time.

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ciąg dalszy nastąpi

Ciąg dalszy nastąpi: Beata Michalczyk i Marta Łącka The project is called redefined by light and shows how light defines man and space, which can be perceived in a literal sense as well as a multi-layered metaphor.

These are two series of photos taken in the same space, the main character of which is the same model, located in exactly the same place. The light and clothes of the girl are changing.

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Marta Łącka

Title: redefined by light / przedefiniowane światłem Author: Marta Łącka / ciąg dalszy nastąpi Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

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Marta Łącka

Title: redefined by light / przedefiniowane światłem Author: Marta Łącka / ciąg dalszy nastąpi Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

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Marta Łącka

Title: redefined by light / przedefiniowane światłem Author: Marta Łącka / ciąg dalszy nastąpi Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

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Marta Łącka

Title: redefined by light / przedefiniowane światłem Author: Marta Łącka / ciąg dalszy nastąpi Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

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Marta Łącka

Title: redefined by light / przedefiniowane światłem Author: Marta Łącka / ciąg dalszy nastąpi Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

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Marta Łącka

Title: redefined by light / przedefiniowane światłem Author: Marta Łącka / ciąg dalszy nastąpi Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

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Marta Łącka

Title: redefined by light / przedefiniowane światłem Author: Marta Łącka / ciąg dalszy nastąpi Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

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Marta Łącka

Title: redefined by light / przedefiniowane światłem Author: Marta Łącka / ciąg dalszy nastąpi Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

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Beata Michalczyk

Title: zmiana tematu / change of subject Author: Beata Michalczyk/ ciąg dalszy nastąpi Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

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Beata Michalczyk

Title: zmiana tematu / change of subject Author: Beata Michalczyk/ ciąg dalszy nastąpi Mega*Zine Lost&Found *** #21/2017 *** CHANGE *** ISSN 2391-4742

POETRY edit. by P. Kasperowicz

Damian Dawid Nowak

"Holiday resort" I felt wonderfully cheated, that the world could and should cease to exist, but the Sun will continue to rise without the alarm-clock accompaniment.

In the holiday resort I saw couples in soft slippers, clean water in an empty pool, lack changed: time in tasks, invariably unbearable.

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Anna O Hollins

When I think of change I do not see it as the end of one thing but the beginning of something else, something that stands by itself.

Change is neutral, it is neither good nor bad, but depends on how you react to it.

Change brings with itself varied emotions. The only way is to embrace it and to feel each and every one of those emotions instead of trying to repel them.

This way change could be more significant. www.anna0h.com https://www.facebook.com/AnnAOHphotographer/

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Anna O Hollins

Untitled 2

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Anna O Hollins

Blend

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Anna O Hollins

Embrace

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Anna O Hollins

Frozen breath

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Anna O Hollins

Untitled 3b

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Anna O Hollins

Untitled 3a

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Anna O Hollins

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Anna O Hollins

Untitled

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Fairytale #22

Body #23

Fight #24

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