October 2025 | poetry
Shadow of a Doubt
Light falling against a solid, upright object
casts a shadow, the sun setting behind mountains
putting the valley fully in shade, no doubt.
In the morning, standing against the railing
on the balcony of your forest home, the valley
again fully in shade, but drawing slowly toward
you as the sun rises higher and higher. Some days,
though, you’re uncertain about rising and pull
the blankets tighter over you despite the songbirds
beckoning, the breeze stirring the pines, the scent
of fresh brew from the kitchen, too many worries
casting a shadow over you even before the day
has begun. But can’t that happen only if you let
the doubts have substance? And when you shine
a light on them, as inevitably you will, won’t they
simply disappear, cloud-filled sky or not?
Jim Tilley
Jim Tilley has published four full-length collections of poetry and a novel with Red Hen Press. His short memoir, The Elegant Solution, was published as a Ploughshares Solo. Five of his poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His most recent poetry collection, Ripples in the Fabric of the Universe: New & Selected Poems, was published in June 2024. His forthcoming collection, When Godot Arrived, will be published in the fall of 2026.
October 2025 | fiction
Carcinisation
When we were little, my half-brother named all his pets after different animals, which our mom initially thought was a vocabulary issue. His goldfish was called Butterfly. His hamster was named Lizard. The family dog responded to “Rhino,” though only when snacks were involved. The cat? Octopus. The snail? Gory. (He later clarified Gory was short for “Gorilla.”)
Despite what everybody might think, I knew this wasn’t random. He once told me that he believed every animal secretly wished to be a different animal on the inside.
“Like nesting dolls,” he said, “but with fur and fury.”
He once watched his shrimp float listlessly near the tank filter and whispered to it: “You’re a whale in captivity, and I see you.” I guess it felt like the right thing to say.
He never named anything Human. That probably felt too ambiguous.
Years later, I told his story in group therapy and nobody laughed. A man named Kyle asked, “So what does he go by these days?”
I gave his question a thought. “Mostly Crab,” I said. “But working toward Pigeon.”
He nodded like that made perfect sense.
Sarp Sozdinler
Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, Flash Frog, Vestal Review, Fractured Lit, JMWW, and Trampset, among other journals. His stories have been selected or nominated for several anthologies, including the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Wigleaf Top 50. He’s currently at work on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam.
October 2025 | nonfiction
I stole your handwriting:
Dear Elsie,
I know it’s been a while since we last connected. It’s been at least 12 years now, bar the occasional Instagram like or Christmas card from your mother. I have something to confess. You might have caught on in the fourth grade — and maybe that is the real reason why we stopped sending letters to each other after you moved away to Virginia — but I spent nine whole months attempting to copy your style of handwriting.
Maybe it was jealousy. It was definitely jealousy. What nine-year-old wouldn’t be jealous of the classmate that consistently wins drawing contests for litter clean-up and yearbook covers? Maybe one that had grown up with siblings, but that wasn’t me.
In February of fourth grade, you went through a phase where you’d dot all of your i’s with teeny-tiny hearts. It was novel — brilliant, even. I’d never seen such a spectacle and I was beside myself. What could I do to match your artistry? I tried smiley faces. I tried tiny stars. Nothing seemed to click. Thankfully, that phase was short-lived, but the two weeks it lasted made “free-write time” a waking nightmare.
For a good, long while, I relished every compliment. I had made your handwriting my own. I had earned those compliments. When I reached young adulthood, the mask started to slip. After all, I hadn’t really developed my own handwriting. I believed that I was living a lie… but then I thought about it for two seconds and realized that at that point in my life, the way I wrote was going to be my script for the rest of my life. I was past the point of developing fine motor skills — so, why should I care if I copied your handwriting in elementary school. It’s not like we’re going to sit next to each other in Ms. Kelly’s dusty, air condition-less room ever again.
In short: I stole your handwriting. It’s mine now. It’s kind of like a squatter’s rights situation we have going on here. And because I don’t know what yours looks like at this point in our lives, I’m assuming you can’t get your old script back. Maybe it looks even more polished now, or maybe you picked up cursive.
You might be a calligrapher or a sign artist at Trader Joe’s. I have no real way of knowing based on your social media presence, but I sincerely hope you’re doing well. Your Our My handwriting has served me well. Thank you.
All my love.
Carlin Steere
Carlin Steere
Carlin Steere is an experimental personal essayist and poet, dividing her time between the New England shoreline and Tampa, Florida. Her work has been published by Yale News, Sweet: A Literary Confection, and the Exeter Green Words Poetry Anthology — among other publications.
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.
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.
