October 2025 | poetry
Aubade for Aurora
Before that late hour of blue cheese
and ruddy-skinned pears, white wine,
she asks me questions I cannot answer simply:
forget night’s history, the weight of excuse?
I cannot ignore her briberies of pink and gold.
Will salutations tangle into word games
and betray the desire to love a while longer?
Her naked confidence is as unabashed as arrogance forgiven.
Her gown sweeps the spiders’ dew:
lint of wherewithal, might-have-been, the else to do.
At the window, she does not have to guess
the dreams of this world, its humble corners.
She walks through orchards: they buzz to bloom,
shadows jump stone walls in glee, the moon sinks to pale regret.
She walks trails with no stumbles or switchbacks,
coaxes crows across a frontiered sky.
Early coffee to wake, scones in their sacrifice;
I plead with her stay, stay, but she does not look back
at the bed we shared: I hear only whispers
of hinge pins swinging their partners away.
Frederick Wilbur
Frederick Wilbur’s poetry collections are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out, Conjugation of Perhaps, and The Heft of Promise. His work appears in many periodicals, including The Atlanta Review, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, New Verse News, One Art: a journal of poetry, Shenandoah, The South Carolina Review, and The Southern Poetry Review. He is poetry co-editor for Streetlight Magazine. He was awarded the Stephen Meats Poetry Prize for best poem of the year by Midwest Quarterly (2018).
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 | 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.
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.
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.
