We were
giants: punk-spiked
and purple-coiffed. We wilt,
and let our down-cradled children
take flight.
CB McCall writes short stories, long stories and bits of poetry. Sometimes she finishes them. Occasionally they even find their way into print. She lives in Nottinghamshire on the edge of Sherwood Forest, which is nowhere near as inspiring as it sounds.
My friends and I
For the entirety of our lives
Have been folded up
Into prettier shapes and smaller size
We are beautiful origami
Held in place by glue and tape
So that we dare never unravel
So that we dare never escape
Tamanda Kanajye is a 20-something-year-old Malawian writer and poet who romanticises the idea of the fragility of the human experience. She writes stories about tenderness, misery, vulnerability, self-destruction and flirts with concepts of hope, salvation and possible redemption. Find her on Twitter (@t_kanjaye).
Don’t know what the insect was called
with the light brown three-sectioned body
see-through brown wings that shimmered into stillness on my arm
but when I showed it to the woman sitting nearest me
in a party of ten at the beach
she thought it was annoying me and tried to kill it.
Martin Heavisides‘ prose is legendary among a more select coterie of devotees than he’d prefer: published in FRiGG, Mad Hatter’s Review, Feast of Laughter, Sein und Werden, among journals of discerning taste. Empty Bowl was given a live staged reading at Living Theatre, New York and another play, CSI Grandma’s House has had a live reading on Zoom with Quarantine Players.
Your child swing sways and wood smoke
fades in a wrinkled sky.
An owl hoots, a branch snaps.
It could be years ago again.
I look past my reflection in the window,
see crow’s feet in the snow.
Virginia Boudreau is a retired teacher from Nova Scotia, Canada. Her writing has appeared in a wide variety of international literary publications including The New York Times, Palette Poetry, Grain, Sylvia Magazine, and Westerly. She has finally completed her first poetry manuscript, twenty years later than planned.
As they haul her down
in a white cotton shroud
a few feet into the earth
upon the bamboo bed
the assembly of mourners
huddles close, listening to
the flutter of their white kurtas
outlining the shape of winds
bending unbending
the dandelion stalks.
Faiz Ahmad is a recent graduate in Biological Sciences, IIT Madras, India. His work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry Daily, Denver Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, Salamander, Carousel and others.
A tiny part of a vast network
with no intermediate stops
yet a line of its own
running straight to the point.
Ilias Tsagas is a Greek poet living in London and he writes poetry in English and in Greek. His poems have appeared at the Sand Journal, The Shanghai Literary Review, the Away With Words Anthology (Vol 4) and elsewhere. Find him on Twitter (@Ilias_Energia).
The truth lines my throat like a cold.
My round mouthed nan is being
mildly homophobic in that
product-of-their-time kind of way.
My granddad leans to me, a willow
arching over a river, and whispers
‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol
is the saddest poem I’ve ever read.’
‘Yes,’ I say ‘Yes’.
Nadia Lines is a nineteen-year-old poet from Hertfordshire. She is currently reading English at the University of Cambridge. She was a 2019 Foyle Young Poet of the Year, and a winner of the 2019 Orwell Youth Prize and the 2020 Tower Poetry Competition. She loves Keats.
When we were kids, we practised this:
the lost art of staring into fires.
There was no need to break the silence
– no one said, ‘hey kid, what you up to?’
it was obvious we were staring into fires.
Watching coals collapsing into embers
is the only lesson in mortality I ever needed.
Georgia Hilton is an Irish poet and fiction writer, now living in Winchester, England. She is published widely in magazines and anthologies and has a pamphlet, I went up the lane quite cheerful (2018) and a collection, Swing (2020), both with Dempsey and Windle. Georgia lives with her husband and three children, and tweets sometimes (@GGeorgiahilton).
and when you speak to the woman
who weaved a basket of history
with the strands of her ancestor’s hair,
she will tell you about the masquerades
with bleeding gums who found science
in their ritual of burning flesh
with woods thralled by strange fires
she will tell you about the virulent gods
who spoke and made gestures with magma,
ashes, chaos, yoked in the sprout of winds.
Adeleke Deborah is a Nigerian writer and teacher. She is passionate about using her artistic skill as a tool for change and impact. Her work has appeared in Okada books. Find her on Instagram (@debbyhife).
Son of an immigrant,
my grandfather worked in
the steelworks of Sheffield,
white heat paring his frame
to sparseness, sharp angles.
A proud man, foreign-tall,
hallmarked with honesty
and shining with kindness,
day by day he forged the
steel of my heritage.
Creana Bosac hails from the UK, where she has worked as an Open University Associate Lecturer and now edits and writes creative writing critiques. Since joining a writing group last year, she has had a number of pieces published and has authored a guide to giving and receiving feedback.
Briefly Write 