Author: brieflywrite

Shrapnel

Charlotte Reynolds

I pull shrapnel out of your daughter
inch by inch
in little stories, told
in no particular order.

Some slip out as easy as pennies;
the ghost on the cycle track,
the ring with no hallmark,
but others catch on flesh.

Still, I marvel at every new piece,
every scattered shard
extracted, rinsed
and glued back together.

And if I stand here,
in just the right place,
I can almost make you out,
a smile in the cracks.

Charlotte Reynolds is a data hoarder, cat lover and death enthusiast (read: amateur genealogist). She lives in London with her boyfriend who is tragically allergic to cats. Find her on Instagram (@violetvicinity).

Thin Dust

Alva Holland

Alter, lengthen hem, shorten cuff, pinch waist. 

Transform, go unrecognisable, invisible. 

Convert, assume another shape, another identity. 

Change, that dreaded thing, that welcome thing. 

Hide fat bones with long sleeves, collars. 

Ignore the weakened teeth, the concave stomach. 

Still see the fat bones, unhidden by sweaters, loose hanging things. 

Absorb the stares, mistake them for admiration. 

Avoid the mirrors, their lies, their misrepresentation. 

Be missing at mealtimes – get better at this. 

Put up defences – walls of fat bones. 

Keep the love out, barricade it.  

Do not weaken resolve. 

Do not cry. 

Change, that dreaded thing. 

Fat bones to thin dust.

Alva Holland is an Irish writer from Dublin. First published by Ireland’s Own Winning Writers Annual 2015 and three times a winner of Ad Hoc Fiction’s flash competition, her stories feature in The People’s Friend, Ellipsis Zine, Train Lit Mag, Brilliant Flash Fiction, The Cabinet of Heed and Jellyfish Review. Find her on Twitter (@Alva1206).

Flower Moon

Emily Cooke

Back to the night garden after
yet another relapse
Onto the waning phase

Sunk to stone again,
Waiting for the never-ending
to end. But then

a simple message sent
I’m celebrating the moon
tonight, are you?

I sat outside
Dragged my hand across the page,
Inhaled the sky

I sat a while
Glad to see that one of us at least
was full

Emily Cooke is a Boltonian poet who has spent most of the last year in bed. Luckily this left plenty of time for writing and she has just started to send her work out into the wider world.

Cleveland National Forest Field Trip

Sage Tyrtle

I’m crouching on the forest floor studying a rock while Rachel tells the other kids that my nose is too big and my mouth is too big and my waist is too big, or I’m pretending to study a rock, really I’m looking at the rock and wishing I was the kind of person who picks up a rock and smashes it into a tiny, exactly the right size nose, someone who bloodies blonde hair, but I’m the kind of person who looks at a rock really hard, so hard that when Mr. Kieler calls for the class to gather at the redwood grove I miss it, and when I look up the whole class is gone and I walk from the rock the way I think they went but no one’s there so I go back to the rock again and again until there’s a starburst of footprints in the dirt starting from the rock and that’s when I hear, far away, too far away, the sound of the school bus, and I already ate my granola bar and I don’t have any water and on the bus they’re all singing On Top Of Spaghetti, on the bus there’s an empty seat in the back but I always sit there by myself, so there’s no one to see that I’m gone, no one to say, turn this bus around.

Sage Tyrtle‘s stories have been featured on NPR, CBC, and PBS. She is a Moth GrandSLAM winner. When she was five she wanted to be a princess until her dad explained that princesses live in a dystopian patriarchy, so she switched to being a writer instead. Find her on Twitter (@sagetyrtle).

Three Photos

Kiley Brockway

And It Just Blew Away

Saturday Stroll

Reflection

Kiley Brockway lives in a suburb of Chicago. She has been previously published in Halfway Down the Stairs literary magazine, and was admitted into a young writers workshop through the University of Iowa. You can find more of her work on Instagram (@kiley_a_brockway).

Gullfoss

Maria Barleben-Adderley

Maria Barleben-Adderley is an audience researcher, who has been passionate about travel photography for twenty years. She found inspiration in Iceland and South Africa, in New Zealand and Russia, and now resides with her husband and two sons in a beautiful countryside of East Sussex.

Mast at sunrise

cloudassassins

cloudassassins is a Scottish photographer focused mostly on nature and landscape photography in black and white or colour. Find out more on Twitter (@cloudassassins).

Ljubljana

Foy Timms

Foy Timms is a poet/writer/photographer based in Reading, Berkshire. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Dust Poetry, Fevers Of The Mind Poetry Digest, Hypnopomp, Merak Magazine, North of Oxford, Peeking Cat Poetry, Pulp Poets Press, Sage Cigarettes, Selcouth Station Press, Small Leaf Press, Tealight Press and Twist in Time, among others. She is preoccupied with themes such as displacement, departure, solitude, British towns/villages, social exclusion and the socio-political dimensions of living spaces.

Two Poems

Hibah Shabkhez

Just Saying

Pulling on scruffy, badly laced joggers
With savage triumph, I dig inky hands
Into the deep pockets of my tree-brown
Greatcoat, and across time’s unblurring sands
Stick my tongue out at the dark memories
Of grumps enforcing ladylike conduct.
I yodel my merry way to the shops,
Cheering because they cannot now deduct
Marks for running, nor take away my book –
     I’m just saying: adulthood sucks;
     But not all of it. Not quite all.

Envy

Tree trembling in the chill autumn,
     Let your wheezing leaves fall,
          Your twigs splinter

I turn grey; you merely gold. Come,
     Drape your glorious shawl
          Of gilded rot.

Tree of branches bared by winter,
     Your spring will come again;
          Mine will not.

Hibah Shabkhez is a writer of the half-yo literary tradition, an erratic language-learning enthusiast, and a happily eccentric blogger from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously appeared in Bandit Fiction, Literati Magazine, Feral, Across The Margin, and a number of other literary magazines. Check out her Linktree here.

Spiderweb

Nancy Byrne Iannucci

 Glistening spiderweb –
                     street wires
                              at sunset.

Nancy Byrne Iannucci is the author of Temptation of Wood (Nixes Mate Review 2018). Her poems have appeared in several publications, some include Allegro Poetry Magazine, The Mantle, Gargoyle, Clementine Unbound, Three Drops from a Cauldron, 8 Poems, Glass: A Journal of Poetry (Poets Resist),Red Eft Review and Typehouse Literary Magazine. Nancy is a Long Island, NY native who now resides in Troy, NY where she teaches history at the Emma Willard School. Find her on Instagram.