Roots aren’t a choice (but knowing them is)
by D.W. Baker / after Angelo Mao
Bold text from Alison Snyder’s 2023 nonfiction “Scientists say Canadian lake marks start of the Anthropocene”
Meet me where badgers meet.
by Molly Knox
amongst startled gorse guiding the aisles of B roads. run to where this moonlight turns its shrubbery neon. where signs glow opal above farmland burrows. read:
Badgers Are Welcome Here.
between you and me, I get lonely inside thicket-thrums of music hollowing out, I hear a night-worn buzz between roots, scratched from clay earth. we are taking over grass-blade nightclubs. reckoning with our sandy horizon of slow moon dancing and nocturnal reputations. pupils will dilate, dimmer. swallow an earthworm whole in a shot glass. conquer hundreds before the mud clutched sun shows up, and asks you, firmly to leave.
meet me the only place we can.
under the wrinkled skin of haggard quarries. where we are no longer lonely. where plundered beech awakens and black rolls white rolls grey towards the turret of a sluggish hill. where shadows of quartz melt your night vision. where everything feels safe.
let us become blots in their landscape. where shallow clouds morph into dregs of frogspawn. where it is gooey under foot. meet me there before I am roadkill under tire tracks. tell you bleary black eyes are worth every scrap. meet me where harmony peels back, musty between each claw. where we pass hay between our chins. shed tears like tiny uprisings.
A dunnock’s prayer
by Corinna Board
O wingless wun,
god o’ smæl bridds,
spære my nest,
my fīf blue eggs.
Bright sky-keeper,
bringer o’ frost,
maker o’ hip an haw,
can ye hear my
tseep tseep tseep
in the hecg?
I sing for ye
in the blackthorn
an the dogrose,
in the hazel
an the rowan.
I, this tyne spearwa
so smæl in yur hand.
Written using a mixture of old English, modern English, and phonic variations of modern English.
Brooding
by Suzanna Fitzpatrick
I roost guiltily, transfixed
by a monitor’s monochrome, spying
on a mess of shed feathers, half
a heart-shaped face. A barn owl,
nesting at the apex of the barn
where we play on rainy days. We sit –
she in the strange limbo of gestation,
a mother with no chore save patience –
I, flawed voyeur, winking
between her and my toddler,|
devouring her silence, waiting by proxy
for an emptied egg, a broken loneliness,
the first open mouth.
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/
D.W. Baker is a submerging poet from St. Petersburg, Florida, USA, where he writes about place, bodies, belonging, and the end of the world. His work appears in Voidspace Zine, Queerlings, Green Ink Poetry, and Heimat Review, among others, and has been nominated for Best of the Net. He serves on the mastheads for Divinations Magazine, Cosmic Daffodil, and Hearth & Coffin. See more of his work at www.dwbakerpoetry.com
Molly Knox is an MA Ethnomusicology student at Durham University. They are a poet, theatre-maker, and reviewer. Their recent work can be read in Magma issue 88, Stone of Madness, The Braag and Ink, Sweat and Tears.
Corinna Board teaches English as an additional language in a secondary school in Oxford. She grew up on a farm, and her writing is often inspired by the rural environment. She particularly enjoys exploring our connection to the more-than-human. Arboreal, her debut pamphlet, was published in January 2024 by Black Cat Poetry Press. Instagram @parole_de_reveuse or Twitter @CorinnaBoard.
Suzanna Fitzpatrick (she/her) is a bisexual poet who has had poems aired on BBC Radio 4 and widely published in magazines and anthologies in the UK, US, Ireland, and Canada. She was shortlisted for the 2019 Bridport Prize, came third in the 2023 Shepton Snowdrops Competition, second in the 2016 Café Writers and 2010 Buxton Competitions, and won the 2014 Hamish Canham Prize and the 2024 Newcastle University Chancellor’s Prize. Her pamphlets are Fledglings (2016), and Crippled (due 2025) (both Red Squirrel Press, UK).