I think it might be
Too hot to bake cookies but
Let’s try something else let’s
Try taking the night off or
Building a pillow fort or
Unraveling
Thread by thread
The ways our stories might
Have overlapped had
Things gone differently
Hana Damon-Tollenaere was shortlisted in the Briefly Write Poetry Prize 2023.
There was nothing. On the walk
I unfolded both my arms, but
not a single leaf would touch
my greedy floating ribs. I knew
I carried needs they were against.
I carried needs. They were against
my greedy floating ribs I knew
not a single leaf would touch.
I unfolded both my arms, but
there was nothing on the walk.
Thomas Mixon has poems in miniskirt magazine, Rattle, Radon Journal, and elsewhere. He’s a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee.
World bee day, it’s mother’s day,
It’s a blue moon, it’s boba day, it’s national turtle day, it’s a Friday, it’s our anniversary, it’s the day we met, it’s your birthday, it’s your birthday again, it’s twenty years ago
On this day, a picture
On your phone: You were celebrating – God knows what. But still,
Thank God you were.
Devaki Devay is a writer of poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Their work can be found in several literary magazines, including Barren Magazine and Peatsmoke Journal, and has been included in Best Small Fictions 2023. Their debut poetry chapbook, LOOKING IN LIGHT, is out with Bottlecap Press.
Today I saw baby geese
and a body
face down on the street.
All the way home I thought
about being lonely. I said
hello to the old man in the lobby;
he told me my legs were lovely,
that my husband had better
watch out.
Alice Louise Lannon is Scottish poet and writer of creative non-fiction, currently living in Vancouver, Canada. She holds an MLitt in Creative Writing from The University of Glasgow. Her publication credits include: Wet Grain, From Glasgow to Saturn, Querencia and Last Stanza Poetry Journal. At the moment, she is working on a book about the sea & storytelling & women’s narratives.
in a search of arms, I found pebbles along the way:
unwanted truths that I threw back to the water
you are lonely
or maybe I misheard.
How deep in the forest are we again?
the clouds have gone green since, and the mud,
perpendicular.
Begüm is an aspiring psychologist, who has been writing poetry for a few years now but only recently started to publicise her work. Most of her pieces are inspired by people she loves. She is now working on getting her first poetry book published.
The debut chapbook by Jasmine Flowers reaches for horizons near and far
Landscapes can be hard to tell apart. In her debut chapbook, Jasmine Flowers orients, disorients, re-orients – and thoroughly entertains her reader.
The long poem starts with voices ‘as they mingle in the wind’. Within two dozen pages, the reader traverses stars, miracles, ‘time, dirt, bone, wind, ash’, a fountain of youth, a leaky pipe and ‘the inkblot borderline’. The journey is as dizzying as you might expect.
The sand is gritty — tiny rocks,
shells, and bones. Is this hell or
paradise? Beach or desert? One
sand or the other? Is there even
a difference?
Lessons can be learned from life’s hardest moments. The aphoristic couplet that opens the fourth section – ‘The tightrope was flimsy, | which taught me a lot’ – is gloriously understated. The proximity of death, the challenges faced throughout life and the learning opportunities that emerge from even the worst scenarios combine in this striking image. The poet goes on to add:
Balance is a fragile line,
and I don’t care for it.
It’s never cared for me,
and we like it that way.
Balance may a philosophical foe for Flowers but equilibrium is exactly what she achieves in her poetry. In front of the setting sun, the poet weaves carefully balanced images, subtle wordplay and a feeling that there is more to her words than first meets the eye.
Magic and the possibility of deliverance recur. Sometimes, however, these charms are thwarted. Asking for the world sometimes leaves the asker wanting:
Name a star or two for me.
I named the universe: You.
In a world that seems ever more fragmented, fluid and overwhelming, the effort of naming is not a futile gesture. It is not easy, though. The reader is left pondering how we can ever define such vastness. What is left when every landmark has been stripped back and all we see is empty space? And what are we supposed to do with all the gaps?
I’m sitting
here waiting, and I hope you notice
— me — or the spaces in between
the absence. Either one is fine.
For all the grandiose, galaxy-level language, the best writing is often the simplest. The poet succeeds when she moves from gigantic to everyday; in the second section, she disarms the reader with an image of brutal directness:
Does that make
me a pencil? Is that why my life feels so
smudgy?
Amid the ephemeral and the everchanging, ‘Horizon’ is a chapbook that cannot easily be erased.
Jasmine Flowers, Horizon (Flower Press, 2021). Available here.
In ‘Street Sailing’, Matt Gilbert looks anew upon familiar streetscapes. His reader can’t not keep looking
In a blog post announcing the release of his debut collection, Matt Gilbert wrote:
‘Unlike maths, or wordle, there’s no ‘answer’ to a poem – only readings’
Poetry certainly resists the neatness of a single irrefutable solution. Instead, it invites readers to think beyond the obvious and acknowledge the plurality of possibilities that could exist.
That’s not to say though that a poem can’t be a puzzle. A puzzle in the sense of a brainteaser, a head-scratcher; a foot-tapping, eye-rolling, knee-jerking conundrum; a challenge, a problem. The world of poetry has many problems.
Even if a poem can’t be solved, it can have answers. These answers are less likely to be 43 or TOAST than another poem sparked into life by the original or a feeling too complex to put into words. A poem’s solution, however splintered and plural, is there in the text. Where else could it be? To find it: don’t not keep looking.
‘Street Sailing’ abounds with linguistic games, which pop onto the page like ‘terse notes sent rattling up through buried pipes’. The title already makes the reader do a double take: how can we sail through the street? Is the alliteration so alluring as to prevail over sense?
The answer is yes – and no. The wind that propels Gilbert’s vessel is rhythm and melody, ‘floating for no reason | until the cuff began to form, | sprouting from that plastic seed…’. But sailing the streets is not merely wordplay; it is an ideal metaphor for how the collection asks its reader to look again at familiar sights. Discovery comes in stages that slowly reveal themselves: first, ‘a sleeve, arms empty | followed by pocket, collar, yoke’.
The poetic game does not have winners or losers; the joy is in the taking part. In ‘Street Sailing’, everyday scenes are taken apart and it is the reader’s job to reassemble them.
In ‘How to flatten the moon’, the poet combines a critique of modern life and its abundance of technologies with an anecdotal plea for the importance of poetry. The title could be taken from a clickbait blog post and, like this dubious genre, you have to read (or scroll) all the way to the end of the poem to get the answer:
… now ease the phone
from your pocket, point it up
towards our ancient friend,
then click.Now you’ve done it.
The answer is simple: a photo can flatten the moon. But what does that mean?
Given that poets have obsessed over the moon for millennia, there is a certain self-deprecating nod when Gilbert romanticises ‘the rounded milky glint | of our almost full fat | satellite’. Is the point then that, where photography flattens and dulls, poetry adds depth and revivifies? The poet’s repeated focus on the present moment emphasises the disconnect between living through screens and LIVING with eyes wide open and capital everything. Poetry is firmly in the latter camp: to write poetry is to observe, really observe; to read poetry is to read and re-read and re-examine everything through someone else’s eyes. Technology has made our lives easier but it has also overcomplicated something as simple as looking at the night sky: as the poet exclaims, ‘there it is, there it is’. Look at it!
Other readings are available. Flat does not have to mean bad. The final line is deliciously ambiguous: ‘Now you’ve done it’ could just as easily be jubilant as derisive, depending on where the stress lands. Capturing a complex astrological body in an accessible 2D-frame could be considered a modern miracle. In the ‘Editor’s introduction’, Matthew M. C. Smith extols the photographic qualities of Gilbert’s collection, exclaiming that ‘his poetry wanders, camera-like […] then zooms in, on the minutiae that most of us ignore’. Flattening boxes before recycling them helps more boxes be recycled.
It’s not just the moon that people fail to notice. Drivers are an easy, and justifiable, target: ‘Rush hour cars kept coming, | oblivious to all but road’, while ‘rasping corvids’ and a ‘lone indignant… sparrowhawk’ perform to an empty audience high above (‘Take the second exit’).
The image could easily be a metaphor for governments’ narrow focus on short-term economic growth, while climate catastrophe creeps ever closer. It could also be a critique of humanity’s treatment of non-human animals, whose suffering on farms and in slaughterhouses is kept well out of sight. Either way, there is hope: although the ‘petrol-powered | roulette balls’ keep spinning, the drivers are ‘desperate for their exit’. If systems can be adapted to redefine priorities, the drivers can adapt with them.
‘Rush hour cars kept coming, | oblivious to all but road’
Although some animals are ignored and others are deliberately obscured, a fox hit by a train is grimly compulsive viewing for the poet: ‘I couldn’t not keep looking’ (‘Foxed’). The double negative is symptomatic of humanity’s confused relationship with other species: most people don’t want to harm animals but neither do they want to stop using (and abusing) them. The presence of violence and death uncomfortably close to a shielded human space (‘the platform’s end’) is a reminder of the interconnectedness of nature and mortality – however hard we try to place ourselves above other life forms. Twinged by this sorry sight, the poet feels duty bound to convert his feelings into words: ‘In the absence of a ritual | I shall mark your empty legend’.
Putting into words the illogical act of staring at something repulsive seems a fitting way to describe why poetry exists. ‘Street Sailing’ is a puzzle with many readings and many answers. Matt Gilbert is a skilful setter, spraying clues, hints and red herrings all around his poetic landscape. Getting lost in this impressive debut is no bad thing.
Matt Gilbert, Street Sailing (Black Bough Poetry, 2023). Available here: Street Sailing – Black Bough Poetry
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.
ART
Elancharan Gunasekaran, ‘ghost coast’
Praveena Pulendran, ‘Bloodset’
POETRY
Aimee R. Cervenka, ‘Thinking of Basements’
Frank William Finney, ‘Elegy for an Elm’
Emily Munro, ‘suitcase dream’
Jennie E. Owen, ‘Haircut’
Namratha Varadharajan, ‘A measure of the past from the future’
Alice Willington, ‘All the time’
FICTION
Tom Frazer, ‘Green’
Cathy Ulrich, ‘Where They Found You’
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…
Poetry competitions can be a controversial topic in the writing community. As a little literary space that hosts an annual Poetry Prize, even we have mixed feelings.
We want to do the best we can for writers and readers. That’s why, during the Briefly Write Poetry Prize 2022, we asked entrants to answer some questions about poetry contests. The responses we received helped shape this year’s competition. Here are the results.
In total, there were 412 responses. All were submitted anonymously and respondents were aware that their answers could not be traced to their entry.
Almost nine in 10 respondents (88%) had not previously submitted to Briefly Write in any form (including Briefly Zine and other competitions). Respondents were asked to answer the questions generally, not specifically for the Briefly Write Poetry Prize (except for the questions summarised in the next section).
Last year, the most popular ways that entrants found out about our competition were online listings pages (24%), Twitter (22%), search engines (17%), other social media (14%), the Briefly Write website (5%), word of mouth (3%) and Duotrope (2%).
More than four in 10 respondents (42%) wrote their entry specifically for the Briefly Write Poetry Prize, while 41% submitted a poem they had already written but had never sent to another journal or competition.
The vast majority (85%) read the guidelines carefully, though some went straight to the entry form (7%) or had only a cursory flick through the rules (7%).
Most respondents “never” pay to enter poetry competitions (46%), ahead of 26% who said they “sometimes” pay and 24% who “rarely” do so. Only 4% said they “often” pay, perhaps unsurprising given that the Briefly Write Poetry Prize is a free-to-enter competition.
In terms of prize pots, the result was conclusive: the most popular option was 1st – 50% // 2nd – 35% // 3rd – 15%, which received close to half of all votes (48%).
A similar option that extended to paying fourth and fifth place (1st – 35% // 2nd – 25% // 3rd – 20% // 4th – 15% // 5th – 5%) received almost a quarter of votes (22%).
The option of having five equal runners-up each winning a tenth of the prize pot (1st – 50% // Runners-up (x5) – 10% each) was favoured by 13% of respondents. Meanwhile, ten joint winners was chosen by only 6%, just ahead of winner takes all (6%).
The rest chose “Other” and offered a wide range of opinions, including one who said offering any prize money creates a “vicious circle”. Others suggested donating the prize money to charity or indicated that monetary reward made no difference to them.
We have been clear since we started Briefly Write that we will never charge entry fees. Financial barriers should not stop people sharing their talents.
We do, however, rely on donations to pay our website costs and prize funds. Every penny we receive is spent directly on covering these costs: we don’t take a penny out for ourselves as editors. Each year, we have increased the prize pot of the Poetry Prize thanks to the generous support of our readers and writers – and we hope to keep doing so.
One option we have considered as a means of raising more funds whilst also providing extra value to entrants’ experience of the competition is to offer some add-on features. This could include things like short feedback or extra insights into the judging process.
Things that respondents said would add the most value to their experience of a poetry contest (besides winning) include:
Some 17% said that none of the above would encourage them to donate, while 14% said they would be donating purely to support the competition.
Overall, respondents preferred unthemed competitions (53%) to contests with a theme (33%). The remaining responses (“Other”) mostly expressed indifference on the issue. The result of this questions is, of course, likely to be skewed by the fact that respondents were answering after having entered an unthemed contest.
In a follow-up question, vague themes such as ‘Be inspired by X / interpret Y loosely’ (68%) comfortably beat specific themes like ‘Write a poem about X / using Y / in the form of Z’ (27%).
As writers ourselves, we understand how frustrating it is to pour your heart and soul into a submission… and then never hear back. That’s why we email every entrant regardless of the outcome of their entry.
It does take a lot of time to send all these emails so we wanted to check it was worthwhile. We asked how much people valued receiving an email to say they haven’t won a competition before the results are announced publicly.
Some 62% chose “I really appreciate it and it makes a big difference to my experience of a competition”. For 31%, it was nice but not essential (“I appreciate being told but it doesn’t make that much difference to me”). Only 4% would “rather not be told if I haven’t won”. This result is supported by a recent Twitter poll we ran.
Those who chose “Other” made suggestions that could reduce the administrative burden such as an automated email to announce the winners. Multiple respondents said that no response is fine so long as this is clearly communicated in advance.
In the event of winning a competition, two thirds wanted to make the most of the opportunity for publicity (62%), while 12% opted for “Just pay me the money”. The large number that chose “Other” reflects a flaw in the question: the intention was not to make people choose between publicity and money but to see whether they valued extra features such as interviews.
Many of the “Other” respondents said they want both prizes and publicity. Some repeated assertions that money shouldn’t mix with poetry or expressed the view that publicity and prizes are secondary to eyes on their writing: “I just want to be read”, “I want recognition for my work” and “I want to inspire people” were common answers.
In the follow-up question, the forms of publicity that winners would most appreciate included the chance to have their poem published in an anthology (75%), online publication (71%), promotion on social media (51%), an interview about the winning poem (43%) and an online feature about the poet (42%).
Encouragingly, 82% said they would still read the winning and commended poems if they hadn’t won. Likewise, 79% said they read the Judges’ Notes when they don’t win a competition.
The most popular material to include in Judges’ Notes was “Insight into what made winning poems stand out” (87%) and “Insight into what made poems fall short” (55%).
An “Overview of common themes / styles / forms” was appreciated by 50%, while 41% were interested in statistics about the number of entries. The few’ “Other” suggestions we received included calls for statistics on the diversity of judges and entrants.
We were delighted with the level of response and thoughtful engagement our survey received. The answers reaffirmed our commitment to running accessible, free-to-enter competitions that treat all entrants with the respect they deserve.
This year, we implemented the prize pot that received an overwhelming number of votes (1st – 50% // 2nd – 35% // 3rd – 15%), despite our own instinct being to pay more writers a smaller amount. This is something we will review again for future competitions.
We will continue to email all entrants regardless of outcome. In the past two years, we have received only a handful of rude responses or arguments about why we were wrong to overlook a poem. Although rare, even these few are dispiriting.
That said, we do always welcome (polite) replies with thoughts or constructive feedback on the competition. And if you would like feedback on your poem, we offer that service too: Briefly Feedback.
If any writers or editors would like to discuss any aspects of the survey, we would be happy to provide more details. Comment below or email contact [at] brieflywrite [dot] com
A stirring trailer builds the reader into a frenzy. The poems do not disappoint
Oceans can be overwhelming. To the untrained eye, an ocean is too vast, too wild, too changeable to be understandable. Elizabeth M. Castillo is an astute tour guide, for she is knowledgeable enough to know how little humans know of an ocean’s true depths.
Come with me;
I will show you how the roots are
fibrous here, like lace, like macrame,
dancing across the dirt
In Not Quite An Ocean, deference to nature is assumed. Humans are nothing but a brief irritation on Earth’s back. ‘Beneath the mountain, Gaia sleeps, weary from the angry years of men waging war across her skin, and plundering her depths with impunity,’ the poet writes in ‘When Mother Nature will not Wake’.
The poet knows that nature has the power to devour humanity. In ‘Things that have replaced my Father’, she evokes ‘this dark cloud that I watch, helplessly, as it swallows him whole’. Mythical allusions reinforce the insignificance of individuals.
One of the collection’s best poems is ‘Storm Tower’, which moves quickly from an individual influencing nature (‘… as if coffee | spilled from your cup had stained atmosphere’) to the natural world’s desperate attempts to tell humanity to change its destructive ways (‘Words are | travelling to you, a message, swollen, begging | to be deciphered’). In the end, the poet urges realism: ‘Steady yourself. Gather your clothes | and wits about you. You can’t outrun the storm’.
If that all sounds pessimistic, it is not. Not Quite An Ocean is a collection that breathes life into wearied souls and offers a brief vision of harmony.
The collection is a rallying feminist cry: ‘The earth was held between two breasts / warm | and safe from the beasts inside’. Only by acknowledging that we are children of Mother Earth can we live peacefully within nature, instead of using and abusing her abundance.
Especially moving is ‘For Sarah, and all those whose names I’ll never know’, in which the countless victims of male violence are remembered:
Prisoners
of war, victims of the Congo saga.
Mauritian
wives, Mauritian daughters, cowering in their kitchens.
Desaparecidas, at Mexican borders, in Argentine towns […]
The poem’s refrain (‘What do we have to do for you to stop killing us?’) washes over the reader with rising intensity. Anger and purpose and the hope of something better are contagious; the prospect of a better future is threaded poignantly into a crescendo that compels the reader to rise up and take a stand.
Castillo’s stylish, imagistic poetry brings people in and invites them to think beyond the page. Like the seasons, the collection offers a varied, sometimes unpredictable, reading experience.
Unsurprisingly for a seasoned fiction writer (see, for example, ‘This thread’, which appeared in Issue 4 of Briefly Zine), prose poems play a starring role, sprawling across the page, defiant and untameable. The poem, ‘In summer I am beautiful’, is one of many examples where poetic form enters into conversation with nature: ‘Winter where shadows creep and creep, where trees are naked, when hope decides to hibernate’.
Hope and despair come in waves. On the blurb, Not Quite An Ocean is described as ‘a paean to the feminine, to motherhood and to the natural world’. Certainly, female power is lauded and nature’s force celebrated. But the poems are far from triumphant.
In ‘When Mother Nature will not Wake’, for example, ‘There is vengeance inside this girl, but she keeps it under lock and key’. In ‘Who will hold the ocean?’, the burden is not shared and the Earth is starting to collapse: ‘Who will breathe life into her wearied sinews, shore up the arms that | hold the continents apart?’
It is a timely question. Unless drastic action is taken, the world’s oceans will contain (by weight) more plastic than fish by 2050. In 2023, the temperature of the world’s ocean surface has already hit an all-time high – a shameful record that will be broken again and again in the coming years and decades.
The cruelty and self-centredness with which humans have used the planet and callously abused other living beings is hard to express in words. Not Quite An Ocean does not quite condemn humanity in the starkest terms. But it does accept our collective guilt: ‘and I must learn the hard way: | the deadliest thing in here is me’.
Briefly Write 