Coming Up
by Zoë Green
The lift moves from darkness into day.
Friedrichstraße, March, unseasonably bright.
If you want to kiss the stranger by your side,
I’d understand. Crossing borders and bridges,
night into day, sometimes we need someone
to hold our hand. Are there stories in your head
about how you think people are? Strangers,
I mean? She’s a classic Kirchner: the gull wings
of her brows, her pride, her leonine mouth.
A park of pickwick crocuses suggests her
aureoles, pressed into the grass, a picnic –
a flask of misted Most, labneh, carrots,
salsa verde: cool, slippery, exactly the fantasy
other life in which I could paint the kitchen
forest green – and nothing would match;
in which I make my home into Rousseau’s Jardin
for a big cat. This life: it fits me like the kiss
from the girl in the lift whose name I never ask.
Presents
by Jack Mckenna
The end of philosophy is now. On the red field,
it’s just you and the ravens, so let the puddles remember
the moons. Leave the stinger in your side, I know
home is elsewhere. The willow cabin burnt down
when everything did. That’s why I’m not bothered.
The housekeepers who taught me addition were killing me,
stitching up night sky. Meet me by the thicket, I’ll show you:
your pennies mean nothing for this toll. Pay it no mind.
Ravel the nine birds stooped to pomegranate seeds.
A COPY OF A COPY OF A COPY IS LIKE A MEMORY DETERIORATING
by Timothy J. Jarvis
You found the relic buried in the silt of a beach on the east coast. The tang of brine and sour green smell of seaweed. When you first felt it with your groping fingers, you thought perhaps you’d struck a shellfish – bent near double by hunger pangs, you’d been digging for razor clams – but once you’d dug it up, you knew immediately. A black & shrivelled thing like a slug, but calcified brittle. Æthelthryth’s tongue, miraculously preserved down the centuries. An object worthy of veneration.
You at nine. Neither big nor small for your age. A boy who lived a lot in his head. This was back before things changed. There was a patch of wasteground, site of an old tannery, witchgrass and snares of bramble, yarrow, nettle, scrub alder and willow, behind the suburban semi-detached house you lived in with your father and brother. In the summer, you wandered there. You’d feign bravery and stalk the scrub brandishing a stalk of dead cow parsley. Or you’d clamber onto an overturned steel drum and peer into the derelict tannery through a smashed casement and shudder to see the charred patches on the concrete floor, as if little heaps of rubbish had been burned in there.
You built the shrine, up behind the dunes, from massy bones that had washed on shore. Yellowing ribs curved overhead, and the lintel was a huge jawbone. Once you were done you washed the salt from the bones. As they dried, a stink oozed out and you had to cover your mouth and stifle your breath.
You at forty-nine. Standing outside in a meadow in late spring. Barefoot in the dewy grass and clover and wild flowers, digging your toes down into the dirt. Staring up in wonder at the colours in the sky, vermillion and jade, puce and ochre, and other shades for which you had no names. At first you thought it was just what you’d taken, but then saw that everyone around also gazed up, slack jawed, nacred glister on their corneas.
From linen scraps you’d found, fluttering frantic, mired out on the saltmarsh slob, you sewed yourself a garb fit for the rite. For thread you used your unstrung sinews, smeared with seepings from your veins. Then you donned this motley cassock, hung swags of hops about your neck, and knelt before the tongue.
Perhaps my feet like roots
by Sarah Lewis
Do you remember the time the world had been taken from us bit by tiny bit, the ever-dwindling space surrounded by darkness until all that was left was a small and lonely box? And when I felt sad you said to throw my head back like this, fling my arms back like this. It’s impossible to feel sad when you’re flung back like that, you said, but still I was sad and you said you are insatiable but what I needed was something like a river. A stream, the dirt of the world among leaves and stars and perhaps my feet like roots, and the thing with roots is they wind round all other roots and they pass between them water and food and important messages like I love you. That’s what I want. Not to be flung back with my eyes closed and my mouth open the sinews pulling at my throat. I want my feet in the earth, winding round roots. I want us to drink from the same streams, the same sun, the light to renew us, every day renewed, wrapped and coiled round each other sharing messages like I love you in the dirt in the earth the air a part of us. I love you. I am not insatiable. All I want is the world.
Issue 9.0 of Carmen et Error was guest edited by Sarah Royston. Sarah’s writing draws inspiration from queer ecologies, plant-lore and the landscapes of southern England. Her work is published in Dark Mountain, The Rumpus and Crow & Cross Keys, among others. Sarah’s prose pamphlet, Fernseed is forthcoming with The Braag in September 2024. She works at Anglia Ruskin University and her work on this issue was supported by the University’s Sustainable Futures Knowledge Exchange fund. Her website is https://hedgeways.wordpress.com/
Zoë Green is a Scottish poet who lives in Berlin. She is proud that, as an emerging writer, her work has been published by Poetry Wales, New Writing Scotland, Under the Radar, The Alchemy Spoon and Carmen et Error over the last couple of years. Her debut pamphlet, Shadow Child, comes out later this year with Hedgehog Press; her first full collection will be published by Valley Press next year.
Jack McKenna resides in Manchester. He has published poetry, articles, reviews, and photography. Currently, he is coproducing scant, a print journal of poetry and photography. His work has appeared in Butcher’s Dog, The Horizon Magazine, and The Manchester Review, among others.
Timothy J. Jarvis is a writer with an interest in the antic and the strange. His novel, The Wanderer,
was first released in summer 2014 by Perfect Edge Books and republished by Zagava in 2022. Short
fiction has appeared in various venues and in 2023 his debut collection, Treatises on Dust, was
published by Swan River Press.
Sarah Lewis is an award-winning writer who is obsessed with the way we tell stories about climate change. She has an MA from UEA and runs Writers’ HQ, the community for writers who want to stop fucking about and start writing.