Lawrence Bradby

I left the house without my phone.
My daughter needed it
for me to leave her on her own.
So beyond these words
there’s no record of the view
I’m looking at:
the cram of orange, peach and white
buildings from far left to far right
the mega-crane, the freight wagons
labouring in their smallness
the swifts scything and scooping
the hot thick air above.

Lawrence Bradby writes poems, short prose texts and essays. He likes the gap between speech and writing. Since October 2020 he has lived in Portugal. He writes a blog about learning a new language and trying to find a way to belong

Sambhu Nath Banerjee

Burgeoning population is the number one enemy for sustainability of life on this earth. It propels disharmony and complete bedlam in peaceful coexistence of man and environment. All these calamities and extremities that we are experiencing of late across continents are because of the thermodynamic disequilibrium brought about by human interference. More and more modernity and dependence on artificial intelligence are causing isolation from Nature. Days are not far when poets and authors would embark on a parched and barren land, starved of elements to pursue their creativity.

A teacher and a researcher, Sambhu Nath Banerjee (Ph.D. CU) from Kolkata, India is passionate about travelling, photography and writing. His works appear in Cafe Dissensus, Muse India, Borderless and 3 Elements. His photograph has found place in the exhibition 2023 Kolkata, organised by ‘Srijan’ SBI Officers’ Association.

Seán Street

Seasonal

I said to Summer,
you burn too hot for comfort.
Said Summer, your choice.

I said to the Spring,
how many leaves are there left?
Said Spring, ask Autumn.

I said to Winter,
you are just a duration.
Said Winter, you too.

Breaking News

It happens on ordinary days,
a bored pencil tapping a glass, 
but the morning post’s leaking in,
the desk light intent as a heron 
and downstream an angle-poise bird aims 
through indifferent reflections.

Seán Street’s recent prose includes Wild Track: Sound, Text and the Idea of Birdsong (Bloomsbury, 2023). His latest poetry collection is Journey Into Space (Shoestring Press, 2022). 

Jayant Kashyap

takes the clouds to the water boats
in Venice / to the streets

in Mawsynram; the birds are gathered
into their nests / and the boys

are called to the rooftops;
the farmer holds in his hands

his bag of seeds— the breeze
takes him to the fields, scatters

them amidst the drops of rain—
the rain amidst which the breeze

is bittersweet / is ambiguous
like a sunflower that loves a day

in the sun and hates too much of it
yet /

The last time Jayant Kashyap’s work appeared in Briefly Zine, one of the poems was nominated for Sundress Publication’s Best of the Net. Since then, his work has appeared in POETRY, Magma and Poetry Wales, among others.

Rucha Virmani

She looks at her daughter sleeping on her lap
and smiles, her heart a hollow cave aching

with love. Outside, a fog settles in, reducing
the naked birch to the silhouette of a life once

lived, its invisible leaves rustling — the elegiac
echoes of a lost lullaby. Ravens sit still on branches, 

waiting for erasure, and the air ripens with the scent
of life turning to something else. The heat ruptures

the skin that had sewn them together. A fig falls
and bursts. — She lets her hands land on her empty

lap, while the wind traces the blurred body
of a daughter that has outgrown her mother’s arms.

Note: ‘…the air ripens with the scent | of life turning into something else’ is based on the last line of Aria Aber’s poem ‘Waiting for Your Call’

Rucha Virmani is the founder of The Climatopia Project (Twitter: @TheClimatopia) that aims to use the power of creative writing for climate activism. She has been published by The Teenager Today and longlisted by Young Poets Network. Her work is forthcoming in The White Cresset Arts Journal. She was selected to participate in Ellipsis Writing’s Summer 2022 workshops.

Lei Kim

Lost

I spotted something
during my morning walk
in the park
under the shadows of trees
black as the wondering night:
a wing
a single wing

I almost reached out
to hang it on a bush
just like someone did
the other day with a child’s cap
found on the grass

Cemetery Rules

No Flowers,
when the cemetery announced,
people were devastated, but a little girl
brought a pebble, flat and pretty,
with words written on it, for her grandmother.

Soon, pebbles with thoughtful words
piled upon the graves, some were tossed, displaced,
then, another came;
No Flowers and Pebbles,
Anything Decomposable within Three Days.

It’s longing that invents uncanny ways of love,
she placed an empty jar beside her lover’s gravestone,
removed the cap, waited a while, and left with it.
One asked about her ritual; speak into the empty jar,
whisper, joke, or simply my love, whatever,

then seal it and let it loose, lungfuls of longing.

Lei Kim is a poet and translator living in France. She translated Lee Jangwook’s poetry collection, Request Line at Noon (Codhill Press, 2016), and received the Modern Korean Literature Translation Award.

Mike Farren

Newcastle, May 1992

I am reading about twins when you walk in,
expected, but immediately part of a tableau

from myth – from an Old Master’s interpretation
of myth – where every part of the picture,

every colour, every fold of every garment,
every cheap ornament, every passer-by

are charged with meaning because they
are being looked at. I am in the picture

but I am looking at the picture, Dora
and Nora Chance are looking at the picture,

Angela Carter, though three months dead,
is looking at the picture, where I sit on a grey

sofa in the lobby of a chain hotel, in a black
denim jacket, reading about twins and look

up, and the one who will be my chosen
twin walks in, says hello and shifts the world.

Mike Farren is a poet, editor and publisher based in Shipley, West Yorks. He has 3 pamphlets, most recently Smithereens (4Word) and is one of the hosts of Rhubarb open mic.

Molly Knox

for gran

and so I got startled thinking they introduced wolves but it turned out to just be his dog. i think they’re gonna introduce wolves. up north. it’s yet to be approved. have to get permission from the crofters, the farmers, the great hills too. do you think it’s better now the clouds have come over?

       if we glare long enough into the patterns on beech trees, the answer will reveal itself. i’d forgotten how beech trees are. sometimes these things keep to themselves. hiding in the edges of grass with mice in wee houses. i read they’re saying tasmanian devils are dying out. i keep thinking they can claw it back. because somehow i keep reading about them.

see, we are used to counting the birds on the garden fence. we used to feed the imaginary chickens, lost your pram in the long grass. sparrows, tits, sometimes crows. those won’t be going anywhere,

surely. what do you bet we get home before the rain comes on? sorry, had to look up the difference between a crow and a whatsyoucallit recently. found out I’d gotten it all wound wrong. like trying to do a cardy up in the wind. counting foxglove leaves alphabetically. they’re saying you don’t know the difference between daffodils and poppyseeds. i can hear it now. if you listen closely enough you can tell the beech tree is hanging to the banking and no more. it’s humming between the light between the leaves: between us. in the end, I think that’s the trouble, with what comes next.

not enough hear it. the road will go down when the winter comes.

Molly Knox is a recent Music graduate of Durham University. She is starting her MA at Durham in Ethnomusicology this autumn. They are a Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net nominee. Their work can be read in The Braag, Ink, Sweat and Tears, and Wrong Directions.