Kym, you will say, if you know my name—which admittedly most of you don’t. So, in fact what you will say is Hey You, don’t submissions close on the 31st/haven’t they already closed on the 15th?

This is a fun phenomenon known as ‘Shrödingers Inbox’, wherein I’ve mucked the date of magazine subs closing back and forth over the last few months as I’ve varied between absolutely scarily inundated and… where have all the writers gone? And now our website says one thing and the submissions aggregators another.

This is objectively a good place to be, it means our readership and the popularity of what we do is growing, but it’s also tricky. We’re sitting on almost 700 individual pieces of work right now, competing for between 6-8 spots! That’s a 1% acceptance rate. That’s wild. The best thing for me to do is to give you a final 48hrs (until 21st Aug) for any last submissions and then close for the remainder of August, and we’ll aim to get back to you all by the end of the month. Remember, good work is good work - don’t talk yourself out of submitting.

This is all a little messier than I’d like it to be, and I’m sorry for the confusion, folks! But the daily running of The Braag and Carmen et Error comes down to me (my wonderful first readers aside) and while I continue to be excellent and dashing (and very handsome in a cravat) I’m also super chronically ill, so you get what you get. It’s not Carmen Sans Error after all.

Full of love and errors,
Kym

P.S., in the future in our open months we will open for 2 weeks rather than 4.

Hi folks,

This is our quarterly reminder that we are open for submissions for the entirity of the month.

Please read our guidelines carefully.

We’re especially keen to hear from poets based in non-North American territories. Particularly (although not exclusively) poets based in the North of England.

Ready, set, submit!

Kym
The Braag CIC
Carmen et Error

Dear Readers,

We have a gorgeous issue for you today, selected by our summer guest editor, Ilisha Thiru Purcell. It was wonderful working with Ilisha and seeing what she chose, so I hope you enjoy the issue as much as we do.

Before we get to that just a few things. First of all we have three new microchapbooks for sale in The Braag’s shop. Each of these is handmade and limited in number.

Lavender Hill by Lauren Thomas looks unflinchingly at the natural world and the darker side of female experience. Here the rural landscape is touched with subtle threat, both beautiful and disturbing. Deftly and lyrically written it moves between kingfishers and roadkill, snares and grief, asking us to ‘contemplate our wastes, our brevity’.

Little Book O’ Moss by Corinna Board is a bright glimpse into the miniature world of moss. Multi-vocal and full of green whisperings, we find tales of deep time and mossy resistance, springing up from found texts and studies of the Chernobyl exclusion zone. It digs its roots deep into ecology and botany, with a lyric precision. Here is a portrait of one of our most important and overlooked plants.

Possession by Stevie Ronnie is a single poem that runs the length of the chapbook, in fragmented couplets that speak to love and desire, it charts the ways in which we can posess another person or be possessed by them. Posession overflows with rich language, simultaneously intense and delicate, marked with want.

If you’d like to see your book advertised here someday, our submissions for Braag books remain open until the end of the month. Please read the guidelines carefully, taking note of the requirements, and hexes.

That’s all from me. Just remember: books are social creatures, and its inhumane to keep them in small groups. Herds of ten thousand or more are reccomended by most Library-Veternarians.

Kym
Carmen et Error
The Braag CIC

Portrait of Ross in LA, 1991
by Tallulah Howarth

Take one.
Take as many as you like. 
Techni colour slump of a man. 
Cellophane like T-cells. 
Candy avalanche hugging 
the corner of the room.
He diminishes slowly, through 
a series of awkward takings.
This wary lean towards the taking. 
Unwrapping. Consuming.
That contagious caution that 
the medics had – hazmats, 
latex gloves, masks. 
The same caution you approach him with
when you are told that, for once,
you can touch the art.

To the body in flux
by Kate Leah Hewett

February’s sneaky twigs act
as though nothing is going on,
all the while harbouring
neon leaves ready
to burst forward like TA DAA!
You send and receive
your surprising postcards.
The knot on your stitches
is a spider in the bath
startling the palm
as it brushes.

SPRING FILLS IN THE BLANKS  
by Aimee Lowenstern

The snow looked like _____
and ______. The sky
looked the same. Clouds
_____ed around the elbows
and knees of the mountains,
their _____ed and ashy points
_____ing over the sweaty
cellulite of the lake,
their bodies bluer
and colder than a _____
body, the water flutterish
as a heart before the _____scape
_____s it. Even _____, it is
alive. Or I am alive, wondrously
alive. Everything (______!)
is either alive
or filled with life, as a
_____ body is filled with some
disco-ball ____s of light
making a party of _____.

i’m dreaming of the sun
by Jonathan Kinsman

and i’m on my back in the long grass again / august dying over us in a nuclear sunset / all my worst dreams are orange / the radiation glow of granny’s fireplace / playing chicken in the second degree / and you’re rising up against the sky / a whole planet / a star collapsing / bending the light about you / a burning halo / when i was six / someone turned off the sun for a hundred and forty-three seconds / all of us scurrying / panicked ants beneath a magnifying glass / eyes dissolving / brimstone on the retina / and shrieking / THE SUN / THE SUN / THE SUN / i know now it was you / with authority from on high / the british astronomical association promised me /it would never be that dark again / not in my lifetime / and the bmj said / we made it out unscathed / but you’re here / in the night / singing paraffin / and so fucking bright / i can’t stop staring

Tallulah Howarth is a multidisciplinary creative and the Co-ordinator of the Writing Squad. They are particularly passionate about Polish jazz, foraging and archives. She was highly commended in the 2024 Hammond House International Literary Prize, and placed second in the 2025 Red Shed Poetry Competition. Last year, she took part in the international ReWrite residency, a literary collaboration between Denmark and the UK. Her debut pamphlet, An Alternative Xanadu, came out in April 2026 with Ossa Prints – in which the square foot measurement of each room in her house dictates the word count for each poem in the sequence.

Kate Leah Hewett (she/her) is a poet, writer, cultural worker, gardener and occasional DJ. She lives on the edge of the Peak District with her wife and daughter. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Ink Sweat & Tears, Queerlings, One Hand Clapping, Sinister Wisdom, Yes, Poetry and elsewhere. She has performed in Yorkshire, New York and on Basilica SoundScape’s Poet Trolley, and has collaborated with musicians including Harkin and Tim Mislock. Hire her to DJ your gay wedding at https://www.handmirror.online

Aimee Lowenstern (she/her) is a twenty seven year old poet living in Nevada. She has cerebral palsy, a pulse, and a pen. Her work can be found in several literary journals, including MEMEZINE and Exist Otherwise.

Jonathan Kinsman (he/him) is a trans poet living near Hope (which is a real place, in Derbyshire). His debut collection, The Fireman’s Daughter, was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2023. Catch him finding new and weird hills to die on (philosophically, and in the Peak District) @manykinsmen.

Issue 16.0 was guest edited by Ilisha Thiru Purcell. Ilisha Thiru Pucell is an award-winning Sri Lankan-Scottish poet from Newcastle upon Tyne. She was part of the inaugural Poets of Colour Incubator Programme and has been a Young Creative Associate with New Writing North. Ilisha was shortlisted for the James Berry Prize 2024 and she was a Poet in Residence at the 2025 StAnza Poetry Festival. Her work has appeared in publications such as Bi+ Lines Anthology, Butcher’s Dog, and Under the Radar. Her debut pamphlet What She Said was published in 2025 by Verve Poetry Press. @ilishadoespoetry

Good evening traveller,

Here I am, lurching out of the dusk with another Carmen et Error issue for you. This one selected by the wonderful Ilisha Thiru Purcell. We’ve got sleep and skins and shuttlecocks, gathered like low slung clouds.

The Braag is still looking for pamphlets, novellas and micro-chapbooks until the end of the month. More info here. For the love of the gods’, please give them a read before you email. I’m always happy to clarify and answer questions, less happy to get something we’re not able to consider. Do not make me beleaguered, dearest writers, you will not like me when I am beleaguered.

Keep an eye on The Braag’s shop too, as there’ll be a bunch of new micros up as soon as my health allows.

Farewell, as I climb back into my crypt,
Kym
Editor The Braag CIC / Carmen et Error

MOURNING SEASON ADVISORY
by Pravy Jha

This year the city moults early.

Already the gutters choke on translucent shoulder-skins. Already apartment balconies sag beneath old selves clipped up to dry beside shirts & school uniforms. Already dogs drag abandoned faces through traffic by the mouth. Already the sanitation workers’ rubber gloves are silvered in grief. Already the municipal warning systems broadcasting PLEASE SHED RESPONSIBLY through loudspeakers warped by rain.

A body in mourning becomes briefly amphibious. This is science. This is policy. Saltwater gathers beneath the skin until the body can no longer contain its weather. Then comes splitting. Then comes peel. Then comes the slow unzip of the self from the self.

The first layer is always easiest to lose.

Children moult cleanly. Whole versions slide from them at once: tantrum-skins, milk-tooth-skins, fever-skins. Mothers fold these carefully into storage tubs beneath the bed. Fathers burn theirs illegally behind apartment blocks after midnight, inhaling the smoke like confession.

During heavy mourning weeks the trains run delayed because discarded skins drift across the tracks in damp heaps, clinging to the rails like pale laundry. City workers shovel us into biohazard bags. Into landfills. Into mass graves. Into history.

My grandmother refused to moult even after my grandfather died.

For months she swelled visibly around the sorrow. Fingertips splitting first. Then lips. Then the thin paper-webbing between her fingers opening quietly each morning at breakfast.

By winter, the grief had nowhere left to go.

At night we heard movement inside her body. Wet shifting sounds. The delicate drag of old versions trying to leave through locked skin. She slept sitting upright in the kitchen with both hands wrapped tightly around herself as though holding shut a door.

Then one morning she simply wasn’t there anymore.

Only her final moulting remained at the table:

perfectly empty,

still warm at the throat.

Same old
by Michelle Penn

Catching Newts
by Elizabeth Feyver

Persistent garden.  You are the hair
of his grave.  Your trees first sprung
from apple seeds thrown from his father’s palm.

Now raise your limbs and sway your brambled
fists at empty skies and milk-white mornings,
in gentle invocation, or surrender.

Your tiny, scattered altars speak
of occupants.  The hidden bones
of lost shuttlecocks and hamsters.
Canopic jam jars filled with sand and stone. 

Our mother’s pain, hanging
apron-like in the kitchen window.
Watching us.  Waiting to call us in

from the afternoon quench of your shade.
When the pond held rock and water.
Catching newts we thought were frogs.

We tickled their writhing tangerine bellies,
daring ourselves to kiss them,
before they slipped beyond our fingers
and back into the darkness.

Pravy Jha is a student writer from India. Her work has appeared in Brilliant Flash Fiction, Blue Marble Review, Last Syllable Literary Journal, and anthologies including Upon Learning That and Rooted In: Rite. She won second place in Writers’ Hour Magazine’s “The Doorway” contest for my story “The Door That Waited.”

Michelle Penn‘s latest collection, Retablo for a door (Shearsman, 2026), was featured in The Guardian‘s ‘Best Recent Poetry Round-up’ and on BBC Redio 4’s poetry programme, ’The Verb.’ Her previous books are Paper Crusade (Arachne Press, 2022) and Self-portrait as a diviner, failing (Paper Swans Press, 2018). michellepennwriter.com

Elizabeth Fevyer is a poet based in Wales, UK. Her poetry can be found, or is upcoming, in publications including The Alchemy Spoon, Crannóg, The Storms Journal, Madrid Review, After…, and Black Bough. In 2025 she won the poetry prize for the Walk Listen Create Write About Walking competition. She is currently studying for the Diploma in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford and is working on the manuscript of her first Pamphlet.

Issue 16.0 was guest edited by Ilisha Thiru Purcell.
Ilisha Thiru Pucell is an award-winning Sri Lankan-Scottish poet from Newcastle upon Tyne. She was part of the inaugural Poets of Colour Incubator Programme and has been a Young Creative Associate with New Writing North. Ilisha was shortlisted for the James Berry Prize 2024 and she was a Poet in Residence at the 2025 StAnza Poetry Festival. Her work has appeared in publications such as Bi+ Lines Anthology, Butcher’s Dog, and Under the Radar. Her debut pamphlet What She Said was published in 2025 by Verve Poetry Press. @ilishadoespoetry

The Braag publishes small books of poetry and speculative fiction! Submissions are open through the month of JULY this year.

We are looking for POETRY PAMPHLETS of between 15-30 pages, as well as SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS / NOVELLAS IN FLASH / EXPERIMENTAL AND HYBRID PROJECTS between 8k - 40k words. These must be by authors currently living (at least part-time) in the UK.

We are also looking for MICRO-CHAPBOOK submissions which are 9 pages of work A6 / 2.5k words, from authors WORLDWIDE.

We do not charge submission fees.

Please, please PLEASE read our full guidelines before submitting, they’re not long and I’ve tried to make them as straightforward for everyone as possible. The guidelines are not arbitrary and reflect what the press is able to manage to accept, edit, and promote with the care and attention it deserves. That said, if you have questions please get in touch.

I’m really excited to see what our fourth round of manuscripts will bring us!

All the best,
Kym
Editor The Braag CIC

Hi folks

This is our quarterly reminder that we are closing for submissions in 24hrs!

Please read our guidelines carefully.

If you’ve got a last minute piece for us, we’d love to see it!

Kym
The Braag CIC
Carmen et Error

Hi folks,

This is our quarterly reminder that we are open for submissions for the entirity of the month.

Please read our guidelines carefully.

We’re especially keen to hear from poets based in non-North American territories. Particularly (although not exclusively) poets based in the North of England.

Ready, set, submit!

Kym
The Braag CIC
Carmen et Error

Hi folks

This is our quarterly reminder that we are closing for submissions in 24hrs!

Please read our guidelines carefully.

If you’ve got a last minute piece for us, we’d love to see it!

Kym
The Braag CIC
Carmen et Error

Hi folks,

This is our quarterly reminder that we are open for submissions for the entirity of the month.

Please read our guidelines carefully.

We’re especially keen to hear from poets based in non-North American territories. Particularly (although not exclusively) poets based in the North of England.

Ready, set, submit!

Kym
The Braag CIC
Carmen et Error

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.

Good morning, readers! I’m writing this to you from a lucid dream that started as some sort of stressful email-based exam.

We’ve got another fantastic issue for you, guest edited by the brill Elizabeth Chadwick Pyewell! Over at thebraag.co, we’re gearing up for the launch of our spring pamphlets and micros, so its worth keeping an eye on us! We’ll have firm dates for all of that soon, my perpetually woman-in-a-victorian-novel-esque health permitting. Lest I be struck down because of insuffiient amounts of shawl.

Submissions for Issue 15.0 will open at the end of the month, and I’ll be back at the helm.

And finally, in a piece of personal news, my debut poetry collection is forthcoming with Nine Arches Press and will be published on April 23rd. Folkish is full of riotous batshittery, worms, tricksters, and post-industrial landscapes. If you like Carmen et Error, you might like it?

Anyway, here’s Issue 14.0

Kym
The Braag CIC & Carmen et Error

Two Such Muckle Border Haunters^† 
By Zoë Green

Granny Dods had a soft spot for wanderers, 
brought tea to her door for the tinsmiths  
who fixed her pans – stopped short  

though of inviting them in. This one thing  
she always said at the end of her phone calls:  
be good to your mum, good understood  

as a curse that might never be undone.  
What about you, Ur-Grandmother, would you  
have welcomed the muckle wanderers  

of the moor, mearcstapa, borderhaunters,  
ellorgæstas^‡ , to warm themselves at your fire? 
Did you consider it wise, to pity outlaws?  

Or yet wiser not to? You are not alone. We,  
border haunters, eye each other yellowly –  
won’t be forced together just because our tongues  

sing the same music as they flap in the wind.  
We have no intent on you: we move like the sea,  
restless, unhoused, yet not homeless. Grateful,  

of course, but we can never be still nor good  
to our mothers whom we left behind in the storm,  
whose hope kindles at every knock on the door.  

^†  Beowulf 1347-8, swylce twegen / micle mearcstapan. my translation 
^‡ ‘spirits from otherwhere’ (my translation). 

The Ill-Met
by Victoria Spires

Minced oaths: a minced oath is a euphemistic expression formed by deliberately misspelling, mispronouncing, or replacing a part of a profane, blasphemous, or taboo word or phrase to reduce the original term’s objectionable characteristics. (Wikipedia)

Zounds (God’s wounds)
The simplest methods are typically the most effective: the snare, the crucifix. It is a sly creature – find its runs, its desire lines. It will be undone by its own energy, or not at all. 

Gadslids (God’s eyelids)
It is advised not to get into a staring competition with the sly one. It possesses a third eyelid, and does not blink. 

Ods bodkins (God’s body)
Like a ripple through sand, almost, or the moment after the moment before a seizure. 

‘Sblood (God’s blood)
Remove the entrails, hang it by its hind legs. Once jugged, it resembles nothing so much as a prayer, folding in on itself – all our wishes, made sticky with concentration. 

‘Sheart (God’s heart)
Is exceptionally large, for His size, and highly susceptible to stress. This is His burden.

‘Sfoot (God’s foot)
Pity the rabbit. Suggestible of a key-chain relic; something cute and cuddly. Pretty little tchotchke. Meanwhile, God is silent, shifty, nothing enviable. 

‘Sdeath (God’s death)
The sly one tires of our japes. To be cas’d, and cas’d, and cas’d again. An entire existence spent inside-out, skinless. The sly one waits for the end of all our frames of reference; waits for true death.

Worms Can Say
by Jess Richardson

Zoë Green is a poet from Angus, who has worked in Colombo, Vienna, Berlin, London and the Engadine valley in Switzerland. Nominated for the Forward Prize, she has appeared in numerous leading journals (Carmen et Error, the London Magazine, Poetry Wales, New Writing Scotland, Southword, berlin lit, the Interpreter’s House, Alchemy Spoon, Under the Radar, Atrium, Scottish PEN and others) , the Scottish Poetry Library’s Best Scottish Poems of 2023, and been placed, shortlisted or commended in major competitions including the London Magazine Poetry Prize, Manchester Poetry Prize, McClellan Prize in Scots, Alpine Fellowship, Gregory O’Donoghue Prize and Winchester Poetry Prize. She is currently writing a PhD on the use of Old English in contemporary poetry to explore edges and boundaries.

Victoria Spires lives in Northampton with her family. Her work has been published widely, including in Berlin Lit, Dust, The London Magazine, iamb, The Interpreter’s House & Atrium. Her poems have been commended/shortlisted in various prizes including Ledbury Poetry Competition & The Plough Prize. She came Third in the Rialto Nature and Place Competition 2025 & won the Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize 2025. Her pamphlet Soi-même is available from Salo Press.

Jess Richardson teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art and is the author of It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides, an FC2 Sukenick prizewinner that was longlisted for a PEN/Bingham award. Poems have appeared in Bending Genres, Sundog Lit, Willow Springs and other places. More can be found at www.jessicaleerichardson.com.

Issue 14.0 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.

Hi folks,

Just a quick one from me this wee. It’s been a pleasure to have Eleanor Ball as our guest editor for Issue 13, and I’m delighted by her selections! I hope you enjoy them as much as me.

Also - I’ll be away from the 13th - 1st November, so any book orders you place during that time won’t be shipped until I get back.

All the best,

Kym
The Braag CIC

No Blankets
by Patricia Russo

They wanted the bed to be comfortable. It was the most they could do. Not the only, but the most. But there were no more blankets left in the world, and the birds no longer shared their feathers with the ground. Rugs, someone else’s grandma said. We could do it with rugs. I know a house where there still are some. But that house had never existed in waking life, only in a dream she remembered from when she had been young.

There were no blankets left in all the world, but children still had the right to dream that things would be better when they woke up, so they gathered together all the dog hairs they could find, which wasn’t as many as you’d think, in these days, and started to spin them into thread. It would take a long time, they were well aware of that, but time still existed on this barren world. There was more of it than they knew how to cope with. At least now they had something to do with their hands in the endless, endless hours between twilight and dusk.

Killing a Deer at Tutuwai Hut
by Alex McCrickard

worm song
by Marten Baxter 

the deep, dark loam’s an astral plane
and i sail its waves alone

i the gut-string
i the sinew
i the coil of jellied muscle:

bravest navigator worm

tides beyond your comprehension
rips & whirlpools, wrecking shoals—
no match for one as bold as me

i steer by tiny stars of quartz
my moon’s the grave mouth up above
my wind the gravebreath’s fecund hush

the rain here does not fall as drops
but sinks through soil until my world’s
a sodden blanket all around:

a sodden world for captain worm
the secret sea of captain worm
O boldest, bravest Captain Worm

Patricia Russo's work has appeared in One Art, The Sunlight Press, Vagabond City, Hex Literary, A Sufferer's Digest, Eulogy Press, and Crow and Cross Keys.

Born in Scotland just before the 1960s and educated on Merseyside, Alex McCrickard has worked in construction and retail. He has been writing for a couple of decades and has had work published by Spelt, Stone of Madness, Poetry News and Gutter.

Marten Baxter (they/them) is a queer mad writer, musician, and recovering academic. Their work often explores relationships with the more-than-human world as well as mental health, gender & sexuality, and political upheaval & resistance. They have recently returned to poetry after too long apart.

This issue was guest-edited by Eleanor Ball. Eleanor is a librarian and assistant professor at the University of Northern Iowa. She was a 2025 Junior Fellow at the Library of Congress. Her poetry and essays have been featured in Barnstorm, Orion’s Belt, Small Wonders, Stone Circle Review, Yalobusha Review, and elsewhere. 

Hello my autumnal ghoulies and goblins,

I am very tired this week, but please enjoy this gorgeous issue, selected by guest editor Eleanor Ball. We’ll be back with Issue 13.5 next week!

Sleepily and spookily,
Kym
The Braag
Carmen et Error

Issue 13.0

Rodeo Stories My Ex-Stepdad Told Me
by Eliot S. Ku 

Before he died, he gave me a .22 caliber revolver assembled from things found in nature, assured me that it worked as good as any, with a handle fashioned from a piece of driftwood—the one and only time he’d seen the ocean, a desolate place with not much to do, he thought. The chamber, which could hold just a single bullet, was the skull of a mouse he’d rescued from stray cats, the only kind of true friend he made in life. The barrel was the long bone of a coyote, hollowed of its marrow and trabecula, discovered in the carved-out wagon ruts of the Old Spanish Trail during the lavender quiet just after sundown. The hammer was a human molar the color of a day that couldn’t decide if it was going to rain, origins unknown, and the trigger the curled fingernail of a barrel cactus spine. There was no safety mechanism, in keeping with the way he’d lived. The bullet he said I’d have to buy from the soda fountain, where they also sold willow bark and laudanum and lime soda ice cream floats, all the things one should need to polish off the wan dust of days.

Once again, I find myself on the other side of my tomb
by Shannon Marzella

Liminal Crush Report
by Isabel Rhoten

We speed into spirals. We enjoy forming triangles: She, I, and an arbitrary third. We out-fickle the squares. She slips my outside face right off. In the language of my survival, her name translates to breathe. She speaks herself in riddles. She speaks to children like an agent of youth. I maintain my belief that she is all gut, all legend, all ghost. I feel her when she pulls. I will let it go. My words take priority. My life is a spell. I know not what to do but how I must do it: Curiosity, Strange, Bold, Abundant, Dancing. She gets it. She kind of does as I do. I kind of do as she does. We borrow coats, tactics, corners of thought. We angle ourselves perpendicular. In every room she enters, she radiates. Her energy is not an illusion. She does not show face when she does not want to. I have not seen her in fourteen months. Time is on her side. She wishes for nothing. Her birthday candles stand idly in the cake. She is a universe with legs. I am all hands, just kneading her space.

If You Die First
by Daniel Roop

save me a seat. Ignore Valentino. Tell him
this star is taken, that I’ll be coming soon.
Tell him that I’m 6’8”. That I’m the only
Ultimate Fighting Champion disqualified
for excessive bloodletting. Tell him
whatever you have to. And dress warm.
Remember how you even had to take jackets to movie theaters.
If you die first, my ribcage will be an empty dumpster,
my heart a starving kitten rummaging for scraps.
I’ll be lonelier than a condemned orphanage.
I’ll be Charlie Parker’s saxophone calling
Charlie Parker’s last breath back.
My past will be a fireworks display from the top
of a ferris wheel. My past will be two bodies
curving into each other like parentheses.
My present will be a damp dishtowel.
My future will be my birth certificate
burning inside a wood stove.
Have I mentioned my heart? It will be the moan
Chewbacca moaned when they took Han Solo away.
It will be a 499-piece puzzle, a strawberry
ice cream cone melting in the Dollywood parking lot.
If you die first, I’ll sleep on the couch every night,
pretending we’ve had an argument and you’re only
eleven steps away. In the morning, I’ll make coffee
and say, Let’s never sleep apart again.
If you die first, leave a trail of soybeans—I’ll
recognize you among the breadcrumbs.
I’ll scoop them up like pirate gold and come running.
When I see you again, for the first time,
my heart will turn into your birthstone.
I’ll go down on one knee and present it.
I’ll ask you all over again.

Eliot S. Ku is a physician who lives in New Mexico with his wife and two children. His writing has appeared in Whiskey Tit, Maudlin House, Carmen et Error, HAD, and Bending Genres, among other places. You can read more at www.eliotsku.com

Shannon Marzella-Kearns holds an MFA in Poetry from Western Connecticut State University. Her young adult novel, Girl in Shadows, was published by Nymeria Publishing in 2021, and her poetry has been published in several journals and anthologies including Sky Island Journal, Stonecoast Review, Ghost City Review, White Stag Publishing’s Spirit anthology, and Mulberry Literary. Her first poetry collection, The Uterus is an Impossible Forest, is forthcoming from Raw Dog Screaming Press in August 2025. You can connect with her on Instagram @shannon_mk_writer or at shannonmkearns.com. 

Isabel Rhoten is a D.C.-based creative. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chartium Magazine, Nowhere Girl Collective, and RHIZOME MAG. For more: isabelrhoten.com.

Daniel Roop is a member of the HWA and SFPA. His speculative work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including Apex Magazine, Cast of Wonders, Flash Fiction Online, Cosmic Horror Monthly, and others. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for his work in Will Work for Peace from Zeropanik Press. He taught at the University of Tennessee’s Young Writers’ Workshop for two decades, and finished in the top 10 at the National Poetry Slam three consecutive times. He is a seventh generation East Tennessean, and his favorite superhero is Kitty Pryde.

This issue was guest-edited by Eleanor Ball. Eleanor is a librarian and assistant professor at the University of Northern Iowa. She was a 2025 Junior Fellow at the Library of Congress. Her poetry and essays have been featured in Barnstorm, Orion’s Belt, Small Wonders, Stone Circle Review, Yalobusha Review, and elsewhere. 

Hi folks!

Here is the Braag’s 2025-6 line up in all its glory! I’m very, very excited for the books the next year will bring, and I hope you are too. Without further ado, here’s a bit more detail on each of them:

2025-6 Titles

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. 

Empirical by Gita Ralleigh explores immigrant life, domesticity and motherhood through a series of lyric poems and narrative fragments, including several ghazals. From Black Star, a voicing of the earliest South Asians in Britain, to abecedarian for maternity ward, postcolonial estrangement, immigrant contingency and tentative instances of love, joy and belonging are illuminated. 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.

Only Fragments Survive by Carmen Marcus is a collection of speculative hybrid fiction and poetry that imagines the life of paranormal historian, Graine O’Malley. Graine is a researcher who divines the history of objects. Her catalogue contains a splinter of driftwood from Captain James Cook’s Endeavour; a hair from a polar bear that washed up in Orkney; a tale of witches from a dressmaker’s bent pin, an Indie mixtape from 1998 and other tales, taken from the history of broken things.

Andrew Blair is a poet, writer and performer living in Edinburgh. His work has featured in Gutter, Umbrellas of Edinburgh and The Last Song: Words for Frightened Rabbit. His debut collection, An Intense Young Man at an Open Mic Night, was published in 2017 by House of Three press, and his pamphlet The R-Pattz Facttz 2020 was released through Speculative Books."

Gita Ralleigh is a poet, writer and ex-doctor, born to immigrant parents in London. Her poems have been published by The Rialto and Magma Poetry among others, her books are A Terrible Thing (Bad Betty Press, 2020) and Siren (Broken Sleep Books 2022). She is a member of the Kinara poetry collective and teaches creative writing to under-graduate scientists at Imperial College as well as facilitating poetry workshops in the community.

Carmen Marcus is a published author, poet, playwright, creative facilitator, and mentor. As the daughter of a Yorkshire fisherman and Irish chef her writing brings together the practical and the magical. Her play AND THE EARTH OPENED UP UNDER HER won Faber New Play Award 2023. Her debut novel HOW SAINTS DIE was published by Vintage in 2018, and won New Writing North’s Northern Promise Award and was long listed for the Desmond Elliott Prize.

Micros

Little Book O'Moss by Corinna Board
Toucan by Jessica Boatright
The Annual Convention of Most Gentle and Virtuous Saints by Heather Chapman
Possession by Stevie Ronnie
Lavender Hill by Lauren Thomas

Corinna Board teaches English as an additional language in an Oxford secondary school. She grew up on a farm, and her writing is often inspired by the rural environment. Her work has appeared in And Other Poems, Anthropocene, berlin lit, Propel Magazine, Spelt Magazine, Atrium, Ink Sweat & Tears, Magma and elsewhere. She published her debut pamphlet, Arboreal, in January 2024.

Jessica Boatright writes from a colourful house in Lincolnshire. Her words have recently been spotted in Magma, The Alchemy Spoon, Anthropocene and Poetry Bus, among others. In 2025 she placed third in the Disabled Poets Best Unpublished Pamphlet Prize and was highly commended in the Kathryn Bevis Memorial Poetry Prize. Jessica is founder of “Raising The Fifth,” a creative digital space for writers without children.

Heather Chapman is a Durham University student. She was a 2023 Foyle Young Poet, was shortlisted for the 2024-5 Poetry Wales Award, and won the 2025 Hive Young Writers Competition. Her work is published in The Garlic Press, Bloodletter and Carmen et Error. Heather likes vampires, sestinas, and Edward II. She is on Instagram @heatherchapman4523.

Stevie Ronnie is a writer and artist based in Northumberland. His most recent publication is And For You (love), an artist’s book of love poems rendered in Braille. His poetry films have screened internationally and attracted several awards. Stevie is the recipient of a Northern Writers Award for his poetry and two MacDowell fellowships for his interdisciplinary work.

Lauren Thomas has been published in various places including Poetry Wales, 14 Magazine, The London Magazine, Lighthouse Magazine, The New Welsh Review, Abridged and Magma. She is co-founder and editor of Black Iris magazine https://www.blackirispoetry.com/ she was long listed in The National Poetry competition 2024, commended in the Magma poetry competition 2025 and her work was recently selected to be featured in the Poetry London Presents series. She holds an MA in poetry writing from Newcastle university and the Poetry School.

Hi folks and genteel folk-horrors,

I realised I never sent Issue 12.5 to you! It’s been a busy period over at The Braag, we’ve just finished our press’s submissions round, and we’re in the process of sending out decisions, so if you haven’t heard from us, keep your eyes peeled.

Further to this, we’re open for submissions to our Micro-Journal (this one!) Carmen et Error, however, due to the volume of submissions we’ve received since offering a small honorarium, we’re having to close early to make it feasible for us to read everything that comes in.

We’re now closing August 15th, 00:00BST.

I also want to remind you that we don’t make any money through Carmen et Error (only through booksales via The Braag) and if you want to support the magazine and directly help pay writers for their work you can make a donation via our Ko-Fi.

Thanks so much for subscribing, reading and submitting!

Kym
The Braag CIC
Carmen et Error

listening to Chani on inauguration day with all social media apps deleted except BlueSky maybe because the sky is all we have left
by Jess Wright
golden shovel after Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho 34 

so we turn once more to the stars,
and headphones fray around
our ears and do not cancel the
bleak hours. still, the tar, frost-bit and beautiful
beneath sun’s early rust, and the moon,
chipped like a tooth and you are the tongue, hide
history with their light: the back
of the starbucks drenched red, the children in their
asteroid snowsuits, your hands, luminous
with touch, the form
from the council you forgot to fill out, beautiful. whenever
the sky loses her teeth, look out for mushrooms and roaches, all
along they were biding us, full
as towers. now we quiver, now we loon, now she
tells us: hold hope in your jaw like a bulb, and the lamp shines
out of our phones as we walk to our desks, pull on
smiles that they might know us, answer the
door if we must, stir milk into the earth

            under streetlights and the wow-wow-wow of the fox, silvery

Breakfast Tacos
by K. Degala-Paraíso
ekphrasis after Chuck Ramirez

After the breakup. After my grandma dies. After your grandma
dies. After the dog dies of diabetic ketoacidosis. After my brother escapes.
After my friend is pregnant. After she isn’t. After my other
brother is robbed. After the overdose. After that night.
Our house is littered with tin foil.

avelina
by JL Bogenschneider
After ‘Avelino Arredondo’, by Jorge Luis Borges

This happens in the future.

Avelina’s older brother takes his own life in jail, following three habitual offences. Her younger brother gets caught in the crossfire when his teacher shoots an intruder on school premises. Avelina’s father succumbs to a cancer whose most effective treatment isn’t covered by his insurance. Her mother dies of a broken heart.

Avelina drops out of college, dissolves ties and ends friendships. She travels all over, only settling down when she arrives in a certain and particular town. She finds work at a
repository. She lives a quiet life.

People attempt to integrate her, but Avelina politely declines all advances. She gets up at dawn most days and walks into town and back before anyone else is awake. She gets to be on nodding terms with dogs and their owners but that’s it. Once a week she drinks coffee at the General Store—it’s important not to be perceived as strange—but otherwise keeps to herself.

On the day the governor arrives for the homecoming parade, Avelina is unable to sleep, so she sits quietly at the kitchen table. An observer might assume she’s meditating, but the truth is that Avelina is only waiting, just as she’s always done. The gun belonged to her father. She oils and cleans it each week.

The governor travels with an entourage. Avelina lets herself into the repository and takes up her place at a window. She’s moments away from firing when fate—or fluke—intervenes. The governor dies, it’s true, but not from a judicially placed bullet. No, the culprit is a quick and merciful heart attack,
sustained during the execution of his public duties, which end draws a veil over his failings and seals his enduring reputation as a hard-working servant, a much-loved man of the people.

What Avelina does next is unknown.

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.

K. Degala-Paraíso (she/they) is a Los Angeles-based Filipinx-American writer. Her work has appeared in [PANK] Magazine, ANMLY, Okay Donkey Magazine, and elsewhere; and has received Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. She teaches creative writing and cuts her own hair. More at kdegalaparaiso.com.

JL Bogenschneider is a writer of short fiction, with work published in The Mechanics’ Institute Review, The Stinging Fly, PANK and Ambit.

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.