Carmen et Error Issue 15.0 + Braag News

Letter from the Editor

Okay, okay I admit it—I only like writing emails when they’re unhinged. I try to maintain a facade, a soupçon, of marketably-quirky-but-fundamentally-earnest-voiceiness, which lends a certain character to The Braag’s newsletters. But, reader? The longer the Braag goes on, or should I say—the longer that I go on, or the longer that the world continues to be sad trombone noise, the more I think why not go apeshit?

The focus, of course, has to be my lovely authors and contributors, who by all accounts know what they’re getting into when they submit to The Braag or Carmen et Error. But I give you no guarantees as to my tone.

We’ve also gained some new subscribers, so I think its just worth going over a few things:

• I send out issues of Carmen et Error twice every three months. I also email you about submissions opportunities, and publications from The Braag. These latter emails happen whenever I can drag my sorry chronic-fatigue-riddled bones onto the mailing software. Sometimes, if its been awhile, it’ll be the same email.

• I’m not splitting up the mailing lists because I wish to live.

• Our books continue to be absolutely brilliant, and are always available via thebraag.co. Carmen et Error is the Braag’s magazine, which features a writer from or living in NE England in each issue and allows people to get a sense of The Braag’s publishing output for free.

• The Braag is my mad passion project, managed day to day by me, but helped out by a lovely set of volunteer first readers, and our prose editor, Ask Vestergaard.

Part of the reason this is such a long catch-up email (in addition to sad trombone noises and CFS riddled bones) is I’ve been working on by debut poetry collection, folkish, which is published next week (!!!). There’s also a slew of events happening online, in London and across the North East. If you’re a fan of poems with worms in em, maybe check it out.

Otherwise, that’s all from me. Enjoy our news and Carmen et Error Issue 15.0, which is another banger.

Keeping Your Emails Weird,
Kym
Director The Braag
Editor Carmen et Error

News from The Braag

Our 2026 poetry pamphlets have now been published!

Empirical by Gita Ralleigh explores immigrant life, domesticity and motherhood through a series of lyric poems and narrative fragments, including several ghazals.These poems trace how inherited myths, contested histories and political tides pattern our lives, leaving indelible marks which corral the course of future imaginaries for ourselves and our descendents.

Let’s make one thing clear: polblar tmolkop by Andrew Blair is not an endorsement of the 2009 film Paul Blart: Mall Cop. If anything, it is an explanation. One that defies explanation itself. In a series of experimental, ludic poems Blair takes us through a series of conversations between the actor and writer Kevin James, and an ambiguous disembodied entity called Polblar.

They’re available via the website, and we’ll also have copies for sale at The Poetry Society’s Free Verse Book & Magazine Fair, which is happening Saturday April 25th, in the Lower Hall of St Columba’s Church, Pont Street, London, SW1X 0BD.

At the Free Verse Fair, we’ll have our Free Verse Exclusive Microchapbook: Possession by Stevie Ronnie, a gorgeously lyric poem about love and desire. They are saddle-sitched and bound in gorgeous textured handmade paper.

I am sorry please stop / continue
the shackles of your hair

the tender lack of language
the soundtrack to a dream

If you can’t make it to the Free Verse Fair, any left over stock will be popped onto our shop, and we’ll have digital PDF copies available later.

LIFE IN THE KINGDOM OF CATERPILLARS
by Sam Grudgings
 

Hail our disordered bodies & their possible forms!  Hail the scapegoat!             The sending! The metamorphosis in waiting! Hail the bodies untameable                    with dialogue!  Their contract of wrecked veins!  Their country fucked speech patterns & unclaimable warranties! Hail all waiting alibis! The machete body                       reveals it wants cleave & wound & facial recognition technology. Wants bodies tessellating with needing incision & demanding borders. Bodies                      tired of demands & no one knowing how hard it has been because everything                     has been difficult & different. Bodies as a favour. As currency.                               Bodies who have no other bodies. Under the earth                                                     a body can become a natural disaster. Hail our natural disaster bodies.!                        The border body wants to become an open body & so tears itself apart.                    Hail the body unable to be idolised seeing as it can instead become a river!          A body is an exhibition to bodies. Monuments to normal. Memorials to want. A body can be blessed with not being. Bodies without bodies offer bodies of evidence of ownership.  Hail the Bodies forced to be for policy, or for paper, or for hallowed institutions, that only house bodies as curios, as precedent, as an example are unable to be anything other than bodies. Hail the body prepared  to be your body! The guarantees of a body only fulfilled in the absence of it.

Krebsgang
by Andy Qifeng Zeng

Nietzsche said that by seeking the beginnings of things, a man becomes a crab—so when you asked why I stopped loving you, I became one. Backwards I shuffled through our fifth-floor walkup, un-making coffee, un-cracking eggs, un-sleeping beside you in the blue hours of November, then sidled down the stairs, past the leaves lifting back onto the ginkgo, the dollops of snow lofting from the yard. I back into the night we met, your cardigan unsagging with rain, your hand un-highlighting “Self-consciousness is in and for itself while and as a result of its being in and for itself for an other.” And I keep retreating, un-ashing your cigar, the white ghost of the leaf darkening vein by vein back to green, your name unforming in my mouth. Finally, I reach the real center of it all, where those incoherent threads of meaning should knot into a first cause, and find nothing. I try to right myself, but my legs won’t work that way anymore.

What Will Be Left
by Penny Blackburn

The darkness at the bottom of reservoirs.
Motorway bridges. The M62.
The highest point. Sleet.

Photos of empty streets at night.
Traffic lights reflecting onto wet tarmac.
The noise of trains braking, the memory

of tracks washed away. Storm petrels,
black vees of loneliness over the ocean.
Empty mills. The gap where they should be.

The creak of rusted swings. Ferrous metals.
Radium. The softening of bones.
Half-skinned horses: museum exhibits

under glass. Fragmented artefacts.
The disturbed memory of an underpass.
Industrial effluent. A river stained yellow.

Wastelands. Broken concrete. Lost spaces.
White noise. The shadow of a cooling tower
falling over its neighbour, slantwise.

The Skin that Clung the Longest
by Jessica Tillings

Just leave me here for the birds,

let my body deescalate–
like the trickling of water over pebbles,

accept my awkward posture
as part of the landscape–
buckling, fawnlike, nose to the moss.

Sam J Grudgings (he/they) is a queer horror poet & events host. Their books The Bible II and Nation’s Saddest Love Poems are available from Verve Poetry Press & Broken Sleep Books.

Andy Qifeng Zeng is a writer from Beijing and an MFA candidate in Fiction at Columbia University. Find more of his words at andyzeng.io.

Penny Blackburn is a Yorkshire poet now based in the North East of England. Her work has featured in many journals and anthologies, including Writing Magazine, Quartet, and The Fig Tree Review. She was Forward Prize nominated in 2025 and was the winner of Crossing the Tees 2025 story competition, as well as Poetry Tyne 2023 and 2024. Her debut collection, Gaps Made of Static, was published by Yaffle Press.

Jessica Tillings is a mother and poet based in Lancashire. Her poetry and artwork has appeared in Tears in the Fence, Blackbox Manifold, HVTN, MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, SPAM Zine, The Wolf, Zarf, DATABLEED, and others. Currently, she is undertaking an MA in Creative Writing at Lancaster University.