Hi Folks,

Welcome to issue 14.5 selected by Elizabeth Chadwick Pyewell. It’s gorgeous, its weird, its everything we set out to do with Carmen et Error, so I hope you enjoy it!

Meanwhile, I’ve got a bunch of Braag stock under my desk, and with me sending some new stuff off to print in the near future, I’d like to reclaim a lil bit of legroom before it arrives.

We don’t do this very often, but we’ve got up to 50% off our 2024-5 titles until February 10th! If you’ve not bought one of our Braag pamphlets before, now would be a really good time to dip in.

SHOP OUR SALE HERE!

Happy reading!
Kym
The Braag & Carmen et Error

Issue 14.5

Poison Highways
By Evelyn Pae

the giant snails burned through miles of shrubland in a single day. their slime killed plants and insects when wet, then dried into a calcaereous husk perfect for driving on. these days we do on occasion have to follow somewhat circuitous routes to get where we’re going. often from the radios of passing cars we will hear curses, the frantic rustling of maps, the disbelieving litany: “who designed this fucking road?” they don’t release the snails anymore, but keep them in a facility some distance east of phoenix. i hear the air turns green at night and smells of ozone and rot a thousand miles into the sky. a lot of taxpayer money was saved, and almost none of it went to feeding my three young children, who’ve grown up stunted and strange, green-eyed and solipsistic and wild about travel. the oldest is saving up to buy a car and talking about going west, where they say a giant laser in the sky has melted a massive expressway of quartz glass from one side of the sonoran to the other, frying untold numbers of weed-smoking hermit huts to smithereens.

Incomplete Rendering
by Shana Ross

So there we are, both
crying, over omelets drowned
in gravy at the Smitty’s in Jasper.
She says I hate that I have to
keep defending my relationship
to, like, everyone I know. And I say,
well.                                          I say,
I love you. From this window, I cannot
see much beyond the street, the park,
the red stone buildings. Old, untouched.
A block away, everything burned.
I brought her here to see the mountains
for the first time, but the fog was so thick
we could not see the other side
of Lake Annette. She took pictures anyway;
proof of all she missed. Before that,
I watched a swab of alcohol wipe her clean,
long enough to get the tattoo
she’s talked about for years. It should heal
just fine. She did not cry then.
There must be a reason
I always think of her in reverse.

Ursula
by Katrinka Moore

They call me Cub because I’m little because I find bears or they
find me because a big mama came close reared up next to me I
could of touched her my brother said he’d tell our stepmother who
scares easy so I kept quiet about that smaller bear I bumped into
on the path first I went left he went right so we’re still face to face
then I go right he goes left same problem so I stand still he makes
a big circle around me gets back on the path keeps going I didn’t
tell anyone not even Angie but the kids still call me Cub

Silo 
By Reese Sterling Alexander

In the zoom-room of my session, my therapist says suffering is optional. Pain is inevitable. She wasn’t there when you taught me how to pronounce inevitable. Or, when we danced in the barn together. Or, when we climbed that entire silo. At the top, I told you: We have to scream out a secret knowing no one at the bottom would hear us. I quoted a Buddy Wakefield poem about seeing every city from a rooftop without jumping. You laughed and said you were happy. Or, I hoped you were happy. Or, I wished
I could’ve kept you like that forever. Maybe you told me your deepest secret and I’m still keeping it. My secret is things got worse when we came down from that silo. You dropped out of college. I left home for good. You locked yourself in your room. We moved away from Wisconsin, from the silo, from each other. My secret is I thought we were going to live forever. We never went back again. But, we should’ve stayed up there. Howling and putting our fingers between the wind. My secret is I still can’t remember everything but I’m trying to. My secret is I want your ghost. The truth is I don’t know what would happen if this ever made sense to me. If my brain ever stopped searching for you. How can I explain to my therapist now, years later, that none of this is optional to me? I have to remember your secret. I have to carry your pain. I have to keep telling myself you were happy. I want to believe there’s another world besides this one. Somewhere, we are both still together, still dancing, and sharing a cigarette in a place where nothing can touch us. My secret is at night when everyone else is asleep and the house creaks,
I hope it’s you.

Evelyn Pae is an aspiring naturalist and writer currently based in central New York. Their work has appeared in Halfway Down the Stairs, Bright Flash Literary Review, and elsewhere.

Shana Ross is a newcomer to Edmonton, Alberta and Treaty 6 Territory.  Qui transtulit sustinet.  Her work has recently appeared in Whale Road Review, Ninth Letter, Grain, Literary Review of Canada and more. She is three years into a project of befriending the neighborhood magpies. 

Katrinka Moore is the author of five poetry books, most recently Diminuendo (2022). She lives in the northern Catskill Mountains in New York state.

Reese Sterling Alexander (he/him) is a poet, insurance agent, and this week, non-smoker. His work can be found in HAD (Hobart After Dark), BRUISER, and Michigan City Review of Books. His most used motifs include ghosts, childhood, and death (derogatory). Some praises for his work include: “gory”, “horrific”, “somehow warm… like a hug”. His instagram is @pizzzapunks.

Issue 14.5 was edited and selected by Elizabeth Chadwick Pywell. Elizabeth has a Northern Writers’ Award and was an Out-Spoken Press Emerging Poet. She’s been widely published in journals including Magma, The North, Fourteen Poems and Poetry Wales, won the Poetry Society’s Stanza competition, and has been commended in the Winchester Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. She co-hosts Rise Up! in York, and a Sampler of her work is available with Mariscat Press.