Hannah Voteur

October 2025 | poetry

Snail Funeral

Between tulip and ryegrass

there is a freshly dug grave

I might be five, or four

black soil beneath my fingernails

loss in the hollows of my footprints

Its viscous body is buried in a bottle cap coffin

offered to the earth under flower beds

opalescent snail shells fragmented between toes

and left to heal beneath swollen mounds

Two weeks later

after my eyes have dried

and my feet have been rinsed clean

I pry it open again in commiserate sunlight

just to see if heaven is real

Because I am five

and God is far

but I hope

not so far for a snail

Hannah Voteur

Hannah (she/her) is a writer, poet, and editor currently working in publishing in NYC as an operations associate. She has loved fiction and stories for as long as she can remember, particularly gothic and evocative literary pieces. She earned her Master’s in Linguistics from Boston University in 2022 and her Master’s in English Language and Literature from the University of Sheffield in 2023. When she doesn’t have her nose in a book, she is most likely baking lemon bars, daydreaming about moving into a cat-friendly apartment, or seeking out new hole-in-the-wall bookstores in her neighborhood.

P. J. Szemanczky

October 2025 | poetry

Returning Home, Teachers

Dying swamp trees are irregularly spaced

by lynx’s cry answered indifferently well,

resigning itself to a natural Providence:

self-satisfied. It filled a belly with wild mice

several times more vigilant than dying trees,

clicking beneath with cricket frogs throats;

occasional ‘shrills’ at yellow unicorn mush-

room caps that appear to flutter somberly.

From a parked wagon a boy is shouting

at dogs out of hunting cages breaking free:

fall fragrant nostrils lighting a first sojourn

event: pairs of oval rhombic blotches

freed in homely patterns of loosestrife &

stripe brown rhythmic leaps pointing back

to inconspicuous silky, odd-waving origins.

Each rushing game in Ithaca stuck together.

Each knew that that funnel squeezed

nutrients out of stingy places. Seeds or

wood sticks, evidently, fed hungry rituals

meditating over oversounds of carcasses

spreading seed plants, risen to dominance.

Furious chases to scrap flesh fresh-cut,

(both human & animal) gifts shrewdest

for brain volume prospects in hostile years

of climate extremes followed by grayness.

Lastly, fierce cold nights left half have learnt

broken trunks cut gale winds, diminishingly.

Even chiming catkin thickets wave no oath

of range alarms to a lynx curled in a pocket

for breeding, nearby aquatic rodent tracks

which barely shake as hind feet webbed and

larger than forefeet: scramble; too, too late!

Winter’s last lash spoils all instruction heard

in the wrecked confines of pitied burrows.

J. Szemanczky

J. Szemanczky is the author of Metaphysically Yours, Immaterially Mine; The Apocalyx Angels of Earth Evolution; and Synthelytic Spacetime Motion, all f/l poetry collections. A member of the CT Poetry Society and formerly of the Maryland Poetry Society, he retired as an ABE/GED CT high school-equivalency teacher and master gouache landscape expressionist painter, guiding hundreds of students to graduate successfully with CT-GED diplomas through his classes. His paintings, along with his poems, essays, and news articles, can be found on the internet, published in Soundings East, The Ravens Perch, Sone Poetry Quarterly, Balance Magazine, Pace Literary Magazine, The Providence Cowl, and many other journals, as well as on “PSC-The Front Page” website* (2009-2013*) where he served as a weekly contributing columnist, editor, interviewer, and cinematographer of Tri-States-NYC Island Metro Productions L.I., NY.