Carmen et Error - Issue 15.5

Hello folks,

Another late but shockingly gorgeous issue to swagger—stylish but somewhat dishevelled—into your inbox and upset the other emails. Somewhere between a book tour and a chest infection that had me wishing for the type and quantity of medication they’d give barn animals at the start of the 19th century, this issue has fallen down the cracks, but I’ve fished it out and blown the dust off and my goodness! Look at how it catches the light.

Oof, those other emails are bristling! Upstart, they whisper, trying to find a synonym for ‘suggestion’ and crying softly into their Teams links. They’ll never have what we have, dear reader. They are but pale imitiations of what a missive should be.

No news here, but new books coming over the summer, and our submissions for the next issue of Carmen et Error (edited by the wonderful Ilisha Thiru Purcell, author of What She Said) remain open until the month’s end.

Enjoy this issue, courtesy of Rachel Bruce, Justin Evans and Sylvie Jane Lewis!

Yours,
Kym
Editor Carmen et Error

The Vampire
by Rachel Bruce

I don’t feel real in my body
but at least I can imagine yours,
your cape and fangs,
your perfect skin and accent.
Halloween escapism,
delicious pretending.
You are nothing like the real creature.
I saw it once on a dark country road,
drinking blood through a straw,
bat-winged, blonde.
In my headlights its eyes
were white.
The next morning it was in my kitchen,
hair wet, drinking tea.

Wise Penelope Gets Up Early
by Justin Evans

Wise Penelope makes pepper jelly in the meantime
dreaming of her husband, come to butcher cruel Antinous
and all the other suitors smoking cigarettes in her living room.
Some bright-eyed god might wrap him in sequins
and guide him, gentle as a lure, over the mirror
of the morning water, to home.

Or maybe he won’t ever come.
She’ll help raise the children these bores make with her neighbors.
And when their boys and girls grow up they’ll want to marry her too.
And every day she’ll tend to the garden just to tear it up late that night.

god damn rabbits
she says, drinking black coffee by the dew wet railing.
Dreaming of her husband painted dawn red in gore.

The Wizard’s Attic
by Sylvie Jane Lewis | after Hove Museum

For it to be the end of November again. For the sky to be the most
necessary pink, as bold as it was soft. For the museum to be nearly
closed – only an hour and a bit left – but we’d make it if we hurried.
To dart around these endless childhood artifacts; to know that
for as long as there are children with imaginations there will be haunted
dolls. Porcelain babies with hollow heads. Disco Ken, depressed
in a glittering vest. A section of the exhibition on one side recreates
a nineteenth-century child’s bedroom, a rocking horse mad with
scarlet fever. The other side of this imaginary room dressed up like
the present – or, to be exact, 2003 – which, I suppose, was once
the present. I decided there that all childhood bedrooms are museums
and wondered what yours might’ve looked like, as you sailed through
the museum in your long pale coat, ribbons swinging from your sides,
the wisps of a ghost. What creatures might’ve littered your floor
as a child, whose eyes watched over you from shiny posters.
Tell me why a toy exhibition should best embody how I feel tonight,
as the New Year makes herself at home in my bones. We’re hours apart
and my mother’s house rocks me to sleep past midnight. Within
minutes I’m back in the museum’s dim light, its expanding time.
Must we stand and read all the accompanying text? I want to float
to the next room, but I want to appear engaged with nostalgia’s
shaking history. Why a toy exhibition should be the architecture
of my longing. Why a toy exhibition should best house the distance
between two people, looking at an heirloom from opposite sides
of the glass. For you are the past to me even as I see you there, even as
I hold you. For you are a memory not close or far enough to focus.
For I am waiting for this day to end so that I might recollect myself
and make sense of it. How I want to kick in the teeth every man
on Hinge who tells me I know from looking at you that my mum would
love you. How I want to run a mile from anyone who loves a lovely girl.
To fly from loveliness like gunfire. How I long to be a wicked doll
behind the glass: eternal and brief and disquieting. These short days
and dark afternoons thaw into each other. You’re hours away
and the gift shop stands twirl with postcards that say wish you were
here across seaside scenes, the sun yellow as an American school bus,
smiling like a headache. For it to be the end of November before I knew
anything, piecing together why on earth you were looking at me like
that, if it was something I said, and thinking how I like how you dress.
For it to be November and for the relics of invented childhoods
to stop winter in her tracks, then let go          for the hours to fly again.

Rachel Bruce (she/her) is a poet based in South London. Her work has appeared in The Poetry Review, Propel Magazine, Atrium, and Ink Sweat and Tears, among others. She is a rep for the Greenwich Meantime Poetry Stanza. Find her on Instagram at @rachjen18. 

Justin William Evans is a poet, playwright, and teacher in North Carolina. His writing has appeared in the Swannanoa Review, Blood Orange Review, Boulevard, and elsewhere. His writing credits for the stage include A Tonguey Kiss for Samuel Davidson, Satan v. Laundry, and In Loving Memory: The Poet and Citizen Martha Whythblath. He holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte.

Sylvie Jane Lewis’s poetry has appeared in The London Magazine, fourteen poems, and Acumen, and placed in the 2025 international Bridport Poetry Prize. She is pursuing an AHRC-funded PhD in Literature and Film at the University of Brighton.