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.
October 2025 | poetry
Because the moon is moving away
from Earth 1.5 inches each year
I know someday this will all be over.
The churning of the tide will soften
as her reliable waxing and waning
disappears. Infinite gravity governs
absolutely. Each action yields equal
and opposite reactions causing continents
to shift. Tectonic plates push and pull
their godlike weight in tug-of-war.
I agree to a road trip with my daughter.
She says there’s a place she trusts
to get the job done right. The notion
of getting a second earlobe piercing
makes me wince. To put my faith
in a stranger’s hands feels like an act
that goes against nature. My body
is void of ink. I haven’t ever gathered
fortitude enough for that commitment.
Nothing lasts a lifetime.
School. Friendships. Lovers.
Houses. Cars. Careers. Plates shift
inch by inch, seasons change.
Impermanence has become
a permanent fixture of my faith,
trusted as the sunrise each day.
But my daughter has also become
a trusted friend. Engaging in this act
of exposition honors that, however small
a show of hope that what has been born
of my body and raised by my hand
can withstand natural forces of change.
When the needle goes through my ear
that brief pinch of pain, I’ll say a prayer
to the moon.
Â
Please don’t leave.
Shyla Shehan
Shyla Ann Shehan is an analytical Virgo from the US Midwest. She holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska, where she received an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work has been featured in The Pinch, Moon City Review, Midwest Quarterly, Anti-Heroin Chic, Drunk Monkeys, and elsewhere, and her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is the co-founder and curator of The Good Life Review and lives in Omaha. For more, please visit shylashehan.com.
October 2025 | poetry
Vanishing
I wish I didn’t cry at creeping vines
forming on bungalows, at bus station
lost and found receipts and forgotten gloves.
At the 60s spirits smoking Pall Malls
in my living room on Sundays evenings
in February when the heat kicks on.
Old dogs and moth-bitten baby photos,
worn-in recliners and class reunions
and lightning bugs in clear jars with the tops
punched out, a useless extension of life.
At the fire breather and the firefighter
holding hands on the Zipper at the county fair.
At stamps collections and scrapbooks at the Goodwill
and the certainty of sunflowers, heads seeking
what scorches them, their devotion unwavering
even after the evening sky dims to navy.
These weren’t my riddle to solve but they weren’t clues either,
just Faberge eggs behind glass at a museum,
public presents originating from a Russian tsar
who also fell victim to a vivacious magician
performing sleight-of-hand tricks with white rabbits and quarters.
At the tsar and rabbits and quarters.
At how they disappeared.
Kaitlyn Owens
Kaitlyn Owens writes poetry about the inheritances we carry—family patterns unseen on medical forms yet shaping us deeply. Her work has appeared in Fjords Review and Novus Literary Arts Journal, and she has received an International Merit Award from The Atlanta Review. A product manager by day and a restorer of old things by night, she believes in naming truths, however complicated. Visit her at www.kaitlynowens.squarespace.com.
October 2025 | poetry
Tract Housing, 1950s
My father pushes a red mower
with swirling blades he sharpens
first, scraping a black stone over
every spiral edge. His grass is precisely
one inch high from top
to bottom.
I roll in the neat cut, stubble pricks
my cheek. Sneeze. Face down
damp ground, green spears pierce
near wormholes, miniature mountains,
volcanoes spewed by ridged wriggles,
dark pink, tubular, timid.
One Sunday morning he rents
a boat, rows us into the harbor
to drop hooks. Our bait is night
crawlers. They’re bigger than
regular worms and try harder
to escape, and you can dig
them only after dark.
They bite and squirm when
he stabs them with the hook,
jams them down till the insides
ooze out. We catch three flat
flounder.  A bottom feeder
now it’s old, one has two eyes
on its back, none on the white
belly. He slits them open,
scrapes out the guts, slices off
the head. That night, we bite
white flesh on white
plates, wield engraved
silver forks and knives.
I know he doesn’t like me
flattening the grass, but
I can’t help myself.
Karen Kilcup
Raised in the area the Abenaki people called Quascacunquen, Karen Kilcup is the Elizabeth Rosenthal Excellence Professor Emerita at UNC Greensboro. She is a past president of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers and the Robert Frost Society. Her academic books include Fallen Forests: Emotion, Embodiment, and Ethics in American Women’s Environmental Writing, 1781-1924, which was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and was named a Choice magazine Outstanding Academic Title, as was her Who Killed American Poetry?: From National Obsession to Elite Possession. Since 2020, Kilcup has focused on writing poetry and has published in numerous anthologies and journals, including Poetry East, Minnesota Review, and Poet Lore. Her book The Art of Restoration (2023) was awarded the 2021 Winter Goose Poetry Prize, and her chapbook, Red Appetite (2023), received the 2022 Helen Kay Poetry Chapbook Prize. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has a second chapbook, Black Nebula (2023). The title poem from her second full-length collection, Feathers and Wedges (2024), was awarded the 2022 Julia Peterkin Literary Award for Poetry. She lives in the seacoast of New Hampshire with her partner Alan, in the company of skunks, bobcats, coyotes, foxes, otters, fishers, and bears.
October 2025 | poetry
thieves and murderers
she gently sacrificed the sparrow
eggs under a strawberry moon
to a mother and her baby raccoons.
just cells in shells, nothing
breathing or eating. it had to be
hard for her. so soft,
her critter loving soul will be haunted
until wrens return to nesting
where sparrows strangled their young.
a simple repair, a smaller hole,
there will be wren babies
eating inch worms and slugs,
beetles and bugs.
imagination, her merciless gift
will see them seize the eggs,
hear them crack the shells and lick
clean every crumb with tiny raccoon tongues.
invasives, she knows, those
house sparrows, but they’re birds,
not yet birds, but on the way to be
someday with pumping hearts and mating
calls, sunwarmed feathers and puddle baths.
maybe if they ate the wrens
to survive like hawks, not just to steal a nest
like soldiers.
Don Farrell
Don Farrell lives in Cambridge, MN with 3 sons, 2 dogs and other critters where land transitions from forest to prairie. He holds a monthly open mic at The ARC Retreat Center in Stanchfield, MN and a bi-weekly zoom poetry critique group. He has a full-length book accepted for publication by Fernwood Press. He has poems in Bodega Magazine, Thimble Literary Magazine, Exist Otherwise, Shoegaze Literary, Brushfire Literary Journal, Five Fleas, The Orchard Poetry Journal, Suisun Valley Review, Men Matters Journal, Willows Wept Review, Harrow House Journal, Mason Jar Press, and New Square of Sancho Panza Poetry. He hopes to leave this planet without getting what he deserves.
October 2025 | poetry, Pushcart nominee
Why Thinking About Taxis Makes Me Sad
I could never trust an Uber or a Lyft,
and I have my own car anyhow.
But should I have the need, I’d prefer
a taxi with bright colors or checkers
and the wide, bulbous car body, as if
other car bodies or frames are underneath,
so the taxi can shed one, like a cicada does,
and move on to its next destination or passenger,
someone waiting streetside and almost desperate
for a ride and to get somewhere safely
in a city where the passenger knows nobody
and needs to get somewhere that may look like
a home for one or two nights and where
there may be the potential for a face that
might make softer the darkness and the unknown
of an unfamiliar city or maybe even someplace
in the country where without a full moon or any
moonlight, the darkness feels like a seal of wax
on the back of an envelope that will never be
cracked by anyone I know or love but only by
a stranger in the night behind a desk with keys
hanging on hooks on the wall and he can’t or won’t
find mine, so I keep walking in the dark
in some cold warehouse district like those
on TV where they find the dead or barely
alive bodies in an old tractor trailer, or
in some cornfield just beyond the edge of the lights
on the highway where the arms of those I love
have become the stubble left long
after the harvest, and the sun
has gone down on my life.
Buzz Lightyear Won’t Forgive You,
nor will the ceramic cat
with the Felix tick-tock eyes.
It’s the people far down
on the street that matter, those
we can barely see for our being
so far up in this silver skyscraper
that makes us forget and not care
about who’s below.
But we can get close again, and the people
can get large, so we don’t forget who and what
they are, so they don’t have to flee
when the hammer drops and the sparks fly.
Doug Funnie we know
is your hero, so quiet and unassuming.
He knows what’s important: the weave
of the living room rug, the fine-enough cotton
sheets that make up your bed, the doctor
who once made house calls and popped
the cork at your wedding.
These are the people who call
your name, who will pat your shoulder
when you need it, who know that magna tiles
gather even more color in the late morning
sun on the porch floor where toys tell
the stories, where playtime is the
supreme value that we should talk about
in church and political speeches,
so we never forget what it’s like
to be pushed on a swing, to have the touch
on the back that keeps us going,
so we don’t forget that hand and those
fingers when we let go and throw ourselves
into the air, assured of the balance
the arms will find and gather
to stick the landing and make sure
the heart is everywhere
the blood flows and may want or think
to go.
Pete Follansbee
Pete Follansbee likes writing in the early morning dark and lives in Richmond, Virginia, a good place to survive climate change and political uncertainty. This summer, Pete’s poems have appeared online in Humana Obscura, the Rockvale Review, and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily. In the past, Pete’s poems have been finalists in contests and have found publication in The North American Review, Barrow Street, The New Guard, About Place, New Millenium Writings, and elsewhere. An MFA graduate of the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, Pete was a T.A. for poet Tim Seibles at the summer 2017 edition of The Writer’s Hotel and a Faculty Assistant for their 2021 Virtual Poetry Weekend. And this coming June 2026, Pete looks forward to being a Director’s Assistant at The Writer’s Hotel in Maine. Pete has a website of his published poems at petefollansbee.com.
