Hello folks,

Welcome to another issue of Carmen et Error. This is just a quick note to let you know that The Braag will be at Free Verse Book & Magazine Fair on Saturday 20 April 2024 at St Columba’s, London, SW1x 0BD. We’ll have copies of our most recent pamphlets for sale and I’m looking forward to our very first book fair as a publisher! Entry is free, but you can register and find more details here.

This issue is filled with children, of one kind or another, each of them offputting in their own, unique ways. It’s a little unsettling, a little odd, and very much us. I hope you enjoy reading!

Kym
Carmen et Error EIC

Issue 8.5

You’re My Crocodile Baby
by Elena Zhang

A typical life starts as an ache. I read this in an encyclopedia entry on reptilian life cycles, because my husband bought me a crocodile egg for my birthday. The egg is marble white, and in my hands it weighs as heavy as a memory. I pop the egg into my mouth and incubate it for ninety days, but you don’t come out. You are supposed to crack the ache with your egg tooth, which is not really a tooth, just hardened skin. What happened to you as a seed to develop such a tough exterior? But you stay inside the brittle walls, so I crush the ache with my jaw. It coats my tongue with chalk. It tastes like chewable vitamins for kids. You curl up in my cheeks, bulging out like a tumor. I feed you blueberry smoothies, bathe you in my saliva, and feel you grow heavier by the day. Your scales tickle my throat, and my laughter lulls you to sleep. One morning, I yawn so wide you see a supernova, the world once occluded now bursting with popcorn color and surging seas. You lurch out of my mouth like a jack-in-the-box. Don’t go, I say. There are guns out there, and blueberry smoothies don’t grow on trees. But you tremble away on sturdy thighs without looking back, not even once. Now, if I touch my tongue to my gums, I still feel an ache there. Lodged in. Like a tooth.

The Oaf
by Kirsten Irving

I am hardly the child you wished for. Kindly, even as I push your patience, you never say these words to me. Plain already, I make myself plainer. Scuff-clumsy, furious, breaking your dishes.

You mark my profile, track my gait and mine my manner for traces of you, but the truth is, Mother, there’s nothing to find. Nor does an ancestor jut from my jawline. The truth is, that thing you suspect – that needle that darts in and out of your brain – is threaded.

They came when you were unconscious, see, and laid me in the still-warm cradle. I recall your glitching frown as you held me – unsure, as you certainly should have been. But everything stolen and forged was a mercy. You don’t know how close you all came to the blade; the plans your baby had for you.

The Seeing
by Alan Bush

I
So many ruptured children
disappearing as the sapling closed
the delight of their season-
changing customs washed out
like the virtue of wood
in the rain, the counting
of their growth, rounded
amongst the liquid, leafless hawthorns,
they are lost

II
we do not remember their nameful voices, the eager
wonder of their eyes under the endless heather
that almost offers land to sky. It is their sleep that lies
here, coalesced into moor-stones, correspondent, keys
to a forgotten warmth, scattered over impoverished
soil. We feel them here, in the surfaced granite
that pricks under our smoothing fingers, those hands
that were distracted from ours, and how they still urge
us to stoop under the lintel through which we had let
in that pursuing pack of hounds, by which the seeing
was loosened, to leave us bound by an un-light, brow
to bracken, temple to turf, until curving, we curled
ourselves to mouth, so feet-full. And still the scrawl
of their finger-phrases obtain, like rubies.

Elena Zhang is a Chinese American writer and mother living in Chicago. Her work can be found in HAD, JAKE, Exposition Review, Your Impossible Voice, and Gone Lawn, among other publications, and has been selected for Best Microfiction 2024. You can find her on Twitter @ezhang77.

Kirsten Irving is a writer, editor and voiceover, originally from Lincolnshire and now based in South London. She co-runs collaborative poetry press Sidekick Books with Jon Stone. Her second poetry collection, Hot Cockalorum, was released in 2022 with Guillemot Books. Kirsten is a folklore and nature nerd who loves a good cemetery. kirstenirving.com

Alan Bush lives and walks the chalk hills of Sussex, England having worked variously as a bank-teller, watermelon-picker and funeral director. He is currently working on his first collection.