To start our new “Writers’ Spotlight” series, we have decided to look back a few years and enlist talented Max Wallis | @maxwallis and through his words live and breathe Villa Lena. Max’s 2019 donation to our collection, “Moonbathers Unravel Themselves” is a perfect homage to the life artists in residence experience when staying with us: safe, unencumbured by daily hurdles, relaxed, and introspective, they become family and teachers to each other.

We sit and smoke,
curl up in this borrowed home, this borrowed nest
like animals hiding from a moon-shocked storm.

We sit and share, speak like people should:
never trying to butt a word in.
Sometimes frustrated, finding balance,
finding a way to keep going,
to keep going.

Max Wallis, excerpt from Moonbathers Unravel Themselves, 2019

Pictures by Max Wallis

Max Wallis, Moonbathers Unravel Themselves, 2019:

lovers on the moonloungers

            grappling with their shared

intensity; a gecko warbles

at their dusty feet.

I sit and watch the sky;

             lightning forks through my chaos

thunder, a sugar hug to alleviate

what used to be:

                         drugs, booze

I am far away from London now.

The singing mum and dad true parents. Never a no,

always a Go for it! Do it! See

what happens little one.

                 The young girl

talks to me in animal noises

a shared language I have a knack

at learning. While new friends dissect

their hurt and pain and love and lust

the old life seems to harden, seems to flake,

seems to shed its skin so that I am no longer afraid

of what will happen tomorrow.

We sit and smoke,

curl up in this borrowed home, this borrowed nest

like animals hiding from a moon-shocked storm.

We sit and share, speak like people should:

never trying to butt a word in.

Sometimes frustrated, finding balance,

finding a way to keep going,

          to keep going.