Carmen et Error 16.0

Good evening traveller,

Here I am, lurching out of the dusk with another Carmen et Error issue for you. This one selected by the wonderful Ilisha Thiru Purcell. We’ve got sleep and skins and shuttlecocks, gathered like low slung clouds.

The Braag is still looking for pamphlets, novellas and micro-chapbooks until the end of the month. More info here. For the love of the gods’, please give them a read before you email. I’m always happy to clarify and answer questions, less happy to get something we’re not able to consider. Do not make me beleaguered, dearest writers, you will not like me when I am beleaguered.

Keep an eye on The Braag’s shop too, as there’ll be a bunch of new micros up as soon as my health allows.

Farewell, as I climb back into my crypt,
Kym
Editor The Braag CIC / Carmen et Error

MOURNING SEASON ADVISORY
by Pravy Jha

This year the city moults early.

Already the gutters choke on translucent shoulder-skins. Already apartment balconies sag beneath old selves clipped up to dry beside shirts & school uniforms. Already dogs drag abandoned faces through traffic by the mouth. Already the sanitation workers’ rubber gloves are silvered in grief. Already the municipal warning systems broadcasting PLEASE SHED RESPONSIBLY through loudspeakers warped by rain.

A body in mourning becomes briefly amphibious. This is science. This is policy. Saltwater gathers beneath the skin until the body can no longer contain its weather. Then comes splitting. Then comes peel. Then comes the slow unzip of the self from the self.

The first layer is always easiest to lose.

Children moult cleanly. Whole versions slide from them at once: tantrum-skins, milk-tooth-skins, fever-skins. Mothers fold these carefully into storage tubs beneath the bed. Fathers burn theirs illegally behind apartment blocks after midnight, inhaling the smoke like confession.

During heavy mourning weeks the trains run delayed because discarded skins drift across the tracks in damp heaps, clinging to the rails like pale laundry. City workers shovel us into biohazard bags. Into landfills. Into mass graves. Into history.

My grandmother refused to moult even after my grandfather died.

For months she swelled visibly around the sorrow. Fingertips splitting first. Then lips. Then the thin paper-webbing between her fingers opening quietly each morning at breakfast.

By winter, the grief had nowhere left to go.

At night we heard movement inside her body. Wet shifting sounds. The delicate drag of old versions trying to leave through locked skin. She slept sitting upright in the kitchen with both hands wrapped tightly around herself as though holding shut a door.

Then one morning she simply wasn’t there anymore.

Only her final moulting remained at the table:

perfectly empty,

still warm at the throat.

Same old
by Michelle Penn

Catching Newts
by Elizabeth Feyver

Persistent garden.  You are the hair
of his grave.  Your trees first sprung
from apple seeds thrown from his father’s palm.

Now raise your limbs and sway your brambled
fists at empty skies and milk-white mornings,
in gentle invocation, or surrender.

Your tiny, scattered altars speak
of occupants.  The hidden bones
of lost shuttlecocks and hamsters.
Canopic jam jars filled with sand and stone. 

Our mother’s pain, hanging
apron-like in the kitchen window.
Watching us.  Waiting to call us in

from the afternoon quench of your shade.
When the pond held rock and water.
Catching newts we thought were frogs.

We tickled their writhing tangerine bellies,
daring ourselves to kiss them,
before they slipped beyond our fingers
and back into the darkness.

Pravy Jha is a student writer from India. Her work has appeared in Brilliant Flash Fiction, Blue Marble Review, Last Syllable Literary Journal, and anthologies including Upon Learning That and Rooted In: Rite. She won second place in Writers’ Hour Magazine’s “The Doorway” contest for my story “The Door That Waited.”

Michelle Penn‘s latest collection, Retablo for a door (Shearsman, 2026), was featured in The Guardian‘s ‘Best Recent Poetry Round-up’ and on BBC Redio 4’s poetry programme, ’The Verb.’ Her previous books are Paper Crusade (Arachne Press, 2022) and Self-portrait as a diviner, failing (Paper Swans Press, 2018). michellepennwriter.com

Elizabeth Fevyer is a poet based in Wales, UK. Her poetry can be found, or is upcoming, in publications including The Alchemy Spoon, Crannóg, The Storms Journal, Madrid Review, After…, and Black Bough. In 2025 she won the poetry prize for the Walk Listen Create Write About Walking competition. She is currently studying for the Diploma in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford and is working on the manuscript of her first Pamphlet.

Issue 16.0 was guest edited by Ilisha Thiru Purcell.
Ilisha Thiru Pucell is an award-winning Sri Lankan-Scottish poet from Newcastle upon Tyne. She was part of the inaugural Poets of Colour Incubator Programme and has been a Young Creative Associate with New Writing North. Ilisha was shortlisted for the James Berry Prize 2024 and she was a Poet in Residence at the 2025 StAnza Poetry Festival. Her work has appeared in publications such as Bi+ Lines Anthology, Butcher’s Dog, and Under the Radar. Her debut pamphlet What She Said was published in 2025 by Verve Poetry Press. @ilishadoespoetry