12.5 C e E + Aug Submissions info [NEW DEADLINE]

Hi folks and genteel folk-horrors,

I realised I never sent Issue 12.5 to you! It’s been a busy period over at The Braag, we’ve just finished our press’s submissions round, and we’re in the process of sending out decisions, so if you haven’t heard from us, keep your eyes peeled.

Further to this, we’re open for submissions to our Micro-Journal (this one!) Carmen et Error, however, due to the volume of submissions we’ve received since offering a small honorarium, we’re having to close early to make it feasible for us to read everything that comes in.

We’re now closing August 15th, 00:00BST.

I also want to remind you that we don’t make any money through Carmen et Error (only through booksales via The Braag) and if you want to support the magazine and directly help pay writers for their work you can make a donation via our Ko-Fi.

Thanks so much for subscribing, reading and submitting!

Kym
The Braag CIC
Carmen et Error

listening to Chani on inauguration day with all social media apps deleted except BlueSky maybe because the sky is all we have left
by Jess Wright
golden shovel after Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho 34 

so we turn once more to the stars,
and headphones fray around
our ears and do not cancel the
bleak hours. still, the tar, frost-bit and beautiful
beneath sun’s early rust, and the moon,
chipped like a tooth and you are the tongue, hide
history with their light: the back
of the starbucks drenched red, the children in their
asteroid snowsuits, your hands, luminous
with touch, the form
from the council you forgot to fill out, beautiful. whenever
the sky loses her teeth, look out for mushrooms and roaches, all
along they were biding us, full
as towers. now we quiver, now we loon, now she
tells us: hold hope in your jaw like a bulb, and the lamp shines
out of our phones as we walk to our desks, pull on
smiles that they might know us, answer the
door if we must, stir milk into the earth

            under streetlights and the wow-wow-wow of the fox, silvery

Breakfast Tacos
by K. Degala-Paraíso
ekphrasis after Chuck Ramirez

After the breakup. After my grandma dies. After your grandma
dies. After the dog dies of diabetic ketoacidosis. After my brother escapes.
After my friend is pregnant. After she isn’t. After my other
brother is robbed. After the overdose. After that night.
Our house is littered with tin foil.

avelina
by JL Bogenschneider
After ‘Avelino Arredondo’, by Jorge Luis Borges

This happens in the future.

Avelina’s older brother takes his own life in jail, following three habitual offences. Her younger brother gets caught in the crossfire when his teacher shoots an intruder on school premises. Avelina’s father succumbs to a cancer whose most effective treatment isn’t covered by his insurance. Her mother dies of a broken heart.

Avelina drops out of college, dissolves ties and ends friendships. She travels all over, only settling down when she arrives in a certain and particular town. She finds work at a
repository. She lives a quiet life.

People attempt to integrate her, but Avelina politely declines all advances. She gets up at dawn most days and walks into town and back before anyone else is awake. She gets to be on nodding terms with dogs and their owners but that’s it. Once a week she drinks coffee at the General Store—it’s important not to be perceived as strange—but otherwise keeps to herself.

On the day the governor arrives for the homecoming parade, Avelina is unable to sleep, so she sits quietly at the kitchen table. An observer might assume she’s meditating, but the truth is that Avelina is only waiting, just as she’s always done. The gun belonged to her father. She oils and cleans it each week.

The governor travels with an entourage. Avelina lets herself into the repository and takes up her place at a window. She’s moments away from firing when fate—or fluke—intervenes. The governor dies, it’s true, but not from a judicially placed bullet. No, the culprit is a quick and merciful heart attack,
sustained during the execution of his public duties, which end draws a veil over his failings and seals his enduring reputation as a hard-working servant, a much-loved man of the people.

What Avelina does next is unknown.

Jess Wright is a writer, teacher, and historian based in Leeds. Their work has appeared in streetcake magazine, Queerlings, Foglifter Journal, and Michigan Quarterly Review, among other publications. Jess has written two books, one on the history of psychiatry and its relationship to classical antiquity, and the other on late antique ideas about the brain. When not writing, Jess teaches academic skills at the University of Leeds, runs occasional creative writing workshops around Leeds, and tries to keep the cats from digging up the rhubarb.

K. Degala-Paraíso (she/they) is a Los Angeles-based Filipinx-American writer. Her work has appeared in [PANK] Magazine, ANMLY, Okay Donkey Magazine, and elsewhere; and has received Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. She teaches creative writing and cuts her own hair. More at kdegalaparaiso.com.

JL Bogenschneider is a writer of short fiction, with work published in The Mechanics’ Institute Review, The Stinging Fly, PANK and Ambit.