Carmen et Error Issue 12.0 + Braag Subs Open

Hi fiends, folks, and friends!

We’ve got a slightly belate Issue 12.0 for you here, with 12.5 following next Sunday. This issue is gorgeous, full of strange and scuttley life, beetles, parasites, crows and unicorns.

In terms of news from us here at The Braag, submissions for our 2026 publishing line up is open until the end of the month. We’re looking for poetry pamphlets and novellas/collections of short stories and flash fiction from UK authors and micro-chapbooks of 9 pages a6 from authors from anywhere in the world. Full guidelines are here.

We also have two new micro-chapbooks available!

Spindrift by Molly Knox moves through the confessional and the egological. Nature, memory, home and homecoming, intertwine in this set of short poems. Saltmarshes feel for star systems, seals are bouyant surgeons, and an overcast august shrugs off rolling council houses. Tender and deftly woven, these poems are rich with image and feeling.

Summer There, Summer Not by V N Garmon is a collection of micro-fictions, by turns absurd, funny and heartbreaking. Garmon conjures up worlds full of precarity, knife-sharp images,  and endings that kick you in the teeth and rifle through your wallet.

Anyway - onto Issue 12.5!

Thanks for reading,
Kym

List
by David Rutherford

You have a book-length list of all the things a crow can’t do.
And I remember the phone calls from the weeks you were writing –
how you said you couldn’t rid the house of the smell of the butchers,
how by the end your fingers were black beaks, and all the smallest
bones in your body were black beaks, black beaks walking your feet
and black beaks buried deep in the secret receiving curls of your ears.

You walked through the cemetery with a scythe and a red lightsaber:
you just wanted space for your own senses to flourish, to mind the sunlight;
wanted room for the parade of a marching band, which was the first item
on the list of what a crow couldn’t do – couldn’t stand in the line required
by a marching band, couldn’t turn the page of the book of sheet music,
or make sense of the notation, couldn’t support a drum across its chest
let alone beat it, couldn’t strap on a silly hat with astonishing gravitas.

Other Invisible Animals
by James King

That horse with the spiralled horn.
    Or brother chupacabra, wet-mouthed.
        Or birds of ozone in the valley.
            Or the hours’ boundaries in a waiting room.
                Or the goldfish when it hides behind the coral.
                    Or the bones of all dead dogs, eaten.
                       Or the doe in the brush before he leaps in front of the car.
                            Or the sprites that tumble when you stare at ceiling lights.
                                Or the world inside your neighbour’s eyes.
                                    Or their idea of evil.
                                        Or God.
                                            Or your father on a flight to Spain.
                                                Or your mother in the nearest hospital.
                                                    Or your mother in the nearest hospital.
                                                        Or the soul’s soft flesh, split.
                                                            Or what rushes up to fill it.

DARKLING
by Prerana Kumar
in praise of the luprops tristis beetle

o small
segmented – o latex
sodden – writhing beet – o acid ulcer –
boba arsenic – in one – in thousand – in
million – per carcass –
o voidybug – romance
ridden – accidental coffee bean –
through crags crevice & canal
– a threshold shivers to see you coming –
surging licorice – you mandible along
– dreaming mulch button – espionage
pollen – prehensile void
for better, for juice – in sickness
& slush – dark your way in –
secrete – secrete
we disobey

poem for the man who identifies as a roman emperor
by Jess Wright
golden shovel after a line from James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk

what audacity. to be neither/
                     nor, to love
the between-spaces; how sponges, neither plant nor
animal, as the romans knew, shrink with terror
from the blade; how the sponge, worldly with parasites, makes
a loneliness out of our singular bodies; how one
theory went that sponges have spiders inside them like souls, blind
beneath ocean’s crease; how pretence to indifference
puppets us; how the spider-scuttled sponge makes
a choreography out of the emperor’s nightmares; how power won,
then lost, cools the tongue to a blade of certainties, chisels corners blind.

David Rutherford is a writer of poetry and prose based in County Durham. He can be found at various poetry events around the north-east, while his poems have previously featured in places such as BBC radio and a shopping centre vending machine. His novella-in-prose-poems, Notation, can be found online in Big Fiction Magazine and he is currently releasing Apex Predator, a monthly audio series he describes as “a sort-of-sitcom with a lot of situation, and a bit of comedy” via davidrutherford.bandcamp.com

James King is a poet from New Hampshire. He is the recipient of the 2020 Academy of American Poets Prize from Dartmouth College, a finalist in the 2023 NC State Poetry Competition, and has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. His writing has appeared in Moon City Review, ONE ART, Passages North, and others. He serves as Poetry Editor for Bear Review and holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. James is currently working on his first book-length manuscript.

Prerana Kumar is an Indian writer and editor based in London. They are currently reading for a funded doctorate in Creative Writing at QMUL. A winner of the 2022 Rebecca Swift Foundation’s Women Poets’ Prize, their debut pamphlet, Ixora is out with Guillemot Press. Their work appears in Magma, The White Review, The Poetry Review, Prototype, and Wasafiri among others. They write about intergenerational inheritances, queer cosmologies, and slippery hauntings as counters to colonial and heteropatriarchal legacies.

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.