Bought in Lisbon, first port of call. A blue pottery bowl.
It holds Co-op coupons, two wrinkled apples, a cutting about dead
Japanese soldiers being identified by the soles of their feet.
Tram No 1
is old – narrow doors, steep steps, red and creamy-yellow livery. Most generate revenue through striking colours: Cola red, Hommerson Casino green, purple for the popular new Aladdin at the Circus Theatre.
I double-checked documents, allowed an extra half hour to travel. The atrium is the largest in The Netherlands. The official welcomed me to the country, but, yes, I must belatedly (no rush) bring authenticated copy certificates of marriage (1973) and death (1977).
Fokkina McDonnell now lives in The Netherlands. Her poems have been widely published and anthologised. She has three collections and a pamphlet. Fokkina holds a Northern Writers’ Award from New Writing North (2020). She blogs on www.acaciapublications.co.uk
An act of militant futility, willed to upend the city’s sense of scale.
To demand a still point in routines hurtling at full pelt.
To subvert circulation, cutting halfway across a roundabout.
To toy with thoughts that even traffic systems have a heart.
To reconstruct a koan: this span will never be complete.
Julian Dobson’s work has appeared in print and online magazines including The Rialto, Acumen, and Stand, and on a bus in Guernsey. Julian lives in Sheffield.
We have journeys by bus, by tram and by foot. Journeys between places, between times, between looks, between cracks, between clocks. Dandelions and endings… and endings that aren’t really endings. Gateways, getaways, soup and Co-op coupons. Each piece explores the gaps between moments and worlds, all in the sparsest words.
In three acts, we travel through rich landscapes of poems, prose and photos. Read them in order, read them in disorder, read between them, read them in your head or out loud, or let the author speak to you. Read them, share them, sit with them. And let us know what you think: email contact@brieflywrite.com.
For Issue 13, we are delighted to pay all contributors thanks to the generosity of our supporters. Thank you for joining us for this brief moment.
You asked me what bird I would be if I were a bird and I told you I would be a Black Swift, living on the wing. I told you I would take the highest crag behind the waterfall and furnish it with the mossiest nest anyone had ever seen – even you would be in awe. And if anybody, bird or beast or man, ever saw my acrobatics in the fine morning spray, they couldn’t help but to believe in something higher, something more. At this point, you tried to tell me what bird you would be if you were a bird, but instead I told you that if I were a Black Swift, I would pepper the afternoon sky with shooting stars of charcoal grey, or hover on the current, in love with the Earth below. You told me that you would be a parakeet with green and gold – I told you that I would tell nobody of my secrets. You said that you don’t understand me anymore. I told you I would die on the wing.
We pay all contributors to Briefly Zine, as well as all writers published through our competitions. Thank you to everyone who has supported our little literary space for making this possible.
Briefly Zine – Issue 14
Submissions for Issue 14 will open in July 2025. Theme to be announced…
We are delighted to announce our nominations for the 2024 Best of the Net anthology.
Needless to say, this is always an extremely difficult decision (we love all the pieces we publish). Best of luck to our nominees; you can (re-)read their work via the links below.
Issue 11 is coming soon. And it’s a special one for us…
Since we started Briefly Zine in June 2020, we have published 10 issues of quality brief writing and photography. We are delighted now to embark on the next chapter of our little literary zine: starting with Issue 11, we will be paying all contributors for their words and art.
Submissions will remain free. That will never change. Therefore, the payment won’t be life changing. Even so, we are immensely proud to be able to offer our contributors a small token of appreciation for their brilliance.
Thank you to everyone who has been a part of our journey so far. There’s a lot more to come…
The Brian Blessed belch I once found hilarious is reverberating around my parents’ tiny dining room and I catch your expression which says ‘yes-I’m-burping-without-restraint-because-I-reject-society’s-arbitary-conventions-and-don’t-care-if-I-am-embarrassing-you-because-I-am-being-real’ and your forearm is crumpling my mum’s best napkin and it still bears the lyrics of adolescent rebellion and as the flabby bass note sustains the room shrinks and shrivels and it’s not my family’s revulsion I feel but my own despair curdling in the warm juice of your gob-hole and if you will never meet me halfway I may as well stay where I am and where are your principles now you’ll accept work from ‘any-posh-cunt-stupid-enough-to-fork-out’ and I hate you using women’s body parts as shorthand for vile people and you are powering the belch through to its foghorny climax and your moth-eaten Anarchy t-shirt is clinging to your second trimester beer-baby when I’m the one who should have a bump to nurture rather than a man-child who suckles himself nightly on homebrew and conspiracy theories and homebrewed conspiracy theories from the safety of a skip-dived swivel chair encrusted in crow shit which is the only thing you have contributed to our so-called home and your booming Brian bugle is diminuendoing and the ribbity undernote is moving to the fore and as your lungs finally empty I realise the burp is not the only thing to have tapered off and a foggy silence reclaims the air and I think about my cosy teenage bedroom and Mum’s spag bol and later I will tell you if you really want to live in an echo chamber how about an empty flat with dodgy wi-fi and a crap-stained plastic throne and then my once enchanting man you can sit on it and swivel down down down into the murky depths of your very own lonely rabbit hole.
Lucy Goldring is a Northerner hiding in Bristol. Lucy has a story in Best Microfiction 2022 and features in Dr Tania Hershman’s 2023 charity flash anthology. She’s been shortlisted by the National Flash Fiction Day three times and twice selected for their anthology. Find her on Twitter (@livingallover) and her website.
I was a bonnie wee lassie growing up in Glasgow. My Dad taught me not to be sectarian when it came to football. Hatred doesn’t mix well with anything, he said, passing me the ball in a moment of shared joy. I was a bonnie wee lassie with a Dad who showed me how to live.
Lament
Bagpipes are traditional at a Scottish funeral, but I’d never buried my Dad before. Melodies aching of bleak hills and glens left me standing, alone, by a cold mountain, scanning the empty landscape to find him there again.
Lizzie Eldridge is a writer, actor and human rights activist from Glasgow. She has two published novels, as well as poems, CNF, stories and flash fiction, and she cares deeply about language, truth and social justice.
Alastair Jackson has spent the last 18 months photographing & travelling around his native Hebrides of Scotland, putting together enough work for a book-length publication. Concurrently, he has been accumulating images of the slightly odd, unique things he has seen by these island roadsides. These images are part of a small series, ‘Strange Currencies’. Alastair likes to move between and amongst different genres of art, and his first book with poet Kenneth Steven was longlisted for the Highland Book Prize in 2019. He also published a zine, ‘Futures Past & Present’ with ADM Publishing in 2021. Find his website here.
Georgina Titmus is a 60-something Cornwall poet and carer. Her work has appeared in South, The Journal, The Frogmore Papers, Fenland Poetry Journal, Orbis, The Moth and others. She has twice been shortlisted in the Bridport Prize.
That part of town where the snow never melts all winter. Cackle-crows chatter something that could be your name. Your body a prayer. Your body a comma, a hyphen, a dash. When I knew you, your hands were never colder than mine.
Other Worlds Than This
After their son dies, Helena’s husband becomes an astronaut. Finds a spacesuit online, buckles the helmet over his head. He sits on their rooftop and stares up at the stars, mumbles. Helena thinks he must see their son’s face there. She is in the quiet kitchen, holding an empty plate and a naked fork, listening to the scrabble of her husband’s hands digging into the rooftop tile. He is talking about building rockets, she thinks, he is talking about taking to the sky.
Cathy Ulrich doesn’t know anybody with hands colder than hers. Her work has been published in various journals, including Black Fork Review, Wigleaf and Pithead Chapel.
dusk dies around our ears, sometimes a hare crosses my path its fawny grey barely visible in wheaten grass and gloom, late afternoon, midwinter birches
wild nights and soft, and a breath that can be all we have and hope, and hope. hope falling, hope sighing.
wild nights and soft, two faces in disco lights, and eyelashes between heavy seed pods and half-laugh sighs.
next hope, next hope
this is someone else’s laundry, someone else’s life and we get to do this gladly we live in the eaves of our desires and we get to do this gladly even through hurt, even through pinpricks we get to do this gladly.
certain grey joy
in your dead mouth there is also hope love lies in places a new snow, even now, barely seen falls, still
Annie McCann-Gomm is a grad student, waitress and writer in the Netherlands. She studies and writes about the anthropology of the environment, thinking about how we can live with the earth and each other.
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