Author: brieflywrite

Two Photos

Karin Hedetniemi

My visual art is inspired by emotionally transportive experiences during my walks – a perceived enchantment of being the only one in the world, or a sense of wonder from so much ordinary beauty. I take spontaneous photographs of landscapes and empty urban spaces, capturing the purity of a fleeting witnessed moment. My images are often dream-like and timeless, evoking feelings of nostalgia, mystery, and solitude.

Spaces Inside Spaces

When I took ‘Spaces Inside Spaces’ I was inside a crowded international airport on a busy travel weekend. Yet wandering just a few gates away, I found myself strangely alone in unoccupied, abandoned spaces.

The Ethereal Nothingness

With ‘The Ethereal Nothingness’, I had woken one morning to the lure of ship horns sounding in the fog. I took my camera down to the sea and disappeared into the mist.

Karin Hedetniemi is a nonfiction writer and photographer from Vancouver Island, Canada. Her atmospheric images appear in numerous literary journals including Barren Magazine, CutBank and Parentheses; on the covers of Pithead Chapel and 3Elements Review; and have been nominated for Best of the Net. Find her online or on Twitter (@karinhedet).

The Space Between Us

Alison Wassell 

Snail slow, we pass neighbours stiff as sentries lining the crescent they call a waiting room for the graveyard. On the main road a bus queue of pensioners pays its respects in what looks like a choreographed routine. When the lights at the bridge are against us you drum the seat as I twist Mum’s ring, the one you said I had no right to, round my too-fat-for-it finger. We stare straight ahead, The Favourite and The Other One, although we never could agree which was which. I ask if you remember the time Grandad’s trilby blew off here, in a blizzard, on his way to wait in for the man coming to mend the telly and we found it, days later, sad and soggy in the thaw. Your lips twitch, but just in time you remember we’re officially not speaking. In silence we pass the school where I fulfilled my potential and you failed to live up to expectations, and the park where you hung out with the rest of the cool kids while I sat in my bedroom watching Top of the Pops on a black and white portable, writing poems that read like suicide notes. We crawl past the pub where we had our first underage drink, me part of your gang for once, stumbling home, arm in arm, to Dad on the doorstep, half-pissed himself and doing his best not to laugh as he read us the riot act. I give you a shy sideways glance and know, somehow, that you’re thinking of the same thing. By the time the car turns into the driveway up to the crematorium our hands have breached the space between us, and our little fingers are entwined.

Alison Wassell is a flash fiction and short story writer, published by Bath Flash Fiction Award, Retreat West, Reflex Fiction, The Cabinet of Heed, NFFD and other random places. She lives in the North West of England with her elderly cat and has no desire whatsoever to write a novel. She wishes people would value short fiction more highly.

Elegy for an Elm

Frank William Finney

How can I read
the empty space?

Fewer leaves
to rake next fall?

One less place
to hold an owl?

One more sign
of one less spring?

Frank William Finney is the author of The Folding of the Wings (Finishing Line Press). His poems can be found in Journal of Undiscovered Poets, The Metaworker, Tiny Wren Lit and elsewhere.  He is a former lecturer from Massachusetts who taught literature at Thammasat University in Thailand for 25 years.

Flying Eros

Fabio Sassi

I shot this photo one summer morning of the ’90s, just a few minutes after Eros had been freed from scaffoldings.

Fabio Sassi makes photos and acrylics that take the everyday and ordinary and frame it in a different way. He lives in Bologna, Italy and his work can be viewed online.

Imperceptible

Frances Boyle

In the warm dry night
a wind carries the new scent.
I strain my senses,
imagining leaf colours
not visible to me now.

Frances Boyle is a Canadian author, whose third poetry collection is forthcoming in fall 2022. Her earlier books include two poetry collections, a novel and a short story collection. Her writing has been published throughout North America and internationally. Frances lives and writes in Ottawa.

ghost coast

Elancharan Gunasekaran

This photo was captured sometime during the covid-19 pandemic on the eastern coast of Singapore. The shot is a reminder of rising sea levels, disappearing coastlines and of a bleak future should we turn a blind eye on our ecosystems and natural environment.

Elancharan Gunasekaran is inspired by Dadaist movements, butoh and anarchism. He believes that humans are capable of governing themselves without the need of political systems. His art often involves experimenting with visual and literary forms on the raw aspects of the human condition, climate change and man-made / natural phenomena.

Untitled

Shawn Ferrari

This photo was taken in my hometown and to me, it evokes this feeling of being slowly swallowed by something you can’t change, something that stays the same or keeps getting bigger and bigger until you’re swallowed whole by it and left with nothing. It has that in common with empty spaces where nothing will change in either space unless deliberate actions are taken to change the space; or, as one of my therapists has put it, nothing changes if nothing changes.

Shawn Ferrari (she/they) writes different third-person bios each time that she submits her work to publications, but they’re unsure if anyone has caught on to that. What people have probably seen though is her work in Wrongdoing Magazine, HOLYFLEA!, Queerlings and her twitter (@cursed_car).

Only do NCFE English Level 2

Tracey Pearson

if you enjoy
bone crushing boredom
and writing imaginary letters
to imaginary councils
about imaginary ice
on imaginary pavements.
Imagine how easy life
would have been if you’d
managed a C at GCSE.

Tracey Pearson is a poet and flash fiction writer from Newcastle upon Tyne. Her work is published in print anthologies, magazines and online. Tracey’s recent writing appears in Culture Matters, Dreich, Selcouth Station, Visual Verse and Poetry Wales.

The Bliss of Morning Solitude

Sambhu Nath Banerjee

During our trip to North Bengal sometime in March a few years back with family and friends, we got down at this station, New Mal Junction. It was not even dawn; the sky was just getting fairer. We waited for the darkness to disappear, and found a thick pall of fog wrapping the air around us. As all the members moved out of the station, I felt a divine tranquillity of the place, and captured the moment to be preserved for posterity.

Passion for travelling imbued with an ardent love for photography inspires me as much as my craving for creative writing. The elements encrypted in Empty Space find a graphic expression in ‘The Bliss of Morning Solitude’. The concept of emptiness of a space can be heightened by the subliminal presence of other objects. In this photograph, the glimpse of a denuded tree in the backdrop of foggy canvas truly brings out the essence of the Empty Space theme.

Sambhu Nath Banerjee (Ph.D.) from Kolkata, India is passionate about photography and writing on cinemas and social issues. His works appear in Cafe Dissensus, Muse India, Borderless and 3Elements.

Green

Tom Frazer

“Green is the most misunderstood colour. There must be more shades of green in the world than stars outside of it. And yet we call it all green.”

He sighs.

The old man is somewhere in a forest, lying on his back.

His sight is starting to fail. He can barely see the canopy above.

Still, he can remember.

He remembers trees he saw once. Remembers the dancing strangled light and the shifting greenness and the blood-black soothing shade and the crashing, seductive whisper of their melody.

He can still hear the melody, even if the rest is hidden. The song hasn’t changed; nor then, he reasons to himself, have the myriad of greens that sing it.

“Did you hear what I said?” he calls out.

No one answers.

There’s no one with him.

He smiles. The melody is just for him.

Tom Frazer is 28 years old and writes in London. He is studying a part-time masters in English Literature alongside work as a barrister.