Issue 3
Flat Ink Issue #3 October 2025
This issue is Autumn― the turning of the world, the nature of all things. Rilke tells us to live the questions, so that we may find ourselves in the answer. Amidst the mourning, regrets, and resignation that come with decay, we find ourselves clearing away a space― Held fast by the insistent murmurs of a new world, waiting to begin.
Click Titles to Read
"Who knew Hell might be cold? / Robins in Buffalo, perhaps. We ask / when we will read about heaven. / Our professor scoffs, Nobody / reads Paradiso."
"morning I read how Camus / chose friendship over safety / on that holiday winter road / back to Paris from Provence in 1960"
"You get a doom! / lo / You get a doom! / We still have time, I tell myself / and anyone who still cares to listen."
"Better yet to have / buried you in the garden, amidst the cherry / and plum trees, the aphids and ants, / and the docile recognition / of earthworms."
"As for the living— / they won’t dare guess at / the caverns of experience / held within the body, / couching the organs as in / a field of dark matter."
Somewhere, a soul is requesting a return to form: / Each unit of time herein seems to it a vessel— / discrete, hematinic—bodies clustering / beside the membrane of the guardrail / of some vanquished voice, and then another,"
"You can pick the fallen fruit, / the unripe walnuts / toxic in their green skins, or / you can let your hands fall to the side; / you can click the button, / you can close the need for this / labor of memory."
"The life she deserves – untarnished and smooth as their wedding bands. Somewhere better beyond the next cloud. My father’s arm cinches her waist. He’s a committed bachelor, feeling the steely bite of a trap."
"[…] and our spawn’s spawn’s spawn, raised on the sermons of our feasting of her body, will learn of her burning death after returning from the hard line of another continent "
"dismiss his withering / convince yourself nothing dies / if there are parts left rooted."
"In the splitting, you found a face that’s not only your face."
By DC Restaino...............12
"seven childhood bedrooms until the world said, Leave them behind, you are adults; a fish named Lonely; a gentling of stern spines; learning, again and again, grief is carried singularly"
"your flashlight beam and how you knew, then, that really everything you hoped for / was nothing more than a series of lights, that you were never made to hold,"
"I know where everything goes / when it is tired of containment, or / wondering, or possibilities, of / the roundness inside a text—where / every inevitable thing / moves as light."
"will love the yellow for joy / will love her voice like wind chimes / will love moving with my baby hands my eyes thin you next to me in the light"
"This is the bridge of the world. / I know you in butterflies & / golden frogs & empty rum bottles / & November drums & rain."
"Zinnias, proud and full. / Tender spine pressed flat, / leather / scrunched and / well-loved, pages in / bloom."
"Denying me nothing but a fate / I choose without choice."
"When the sun appeared, / An orange light orbiting / The barn we chose / To feed the fire."
By Sophia Abbas…….........................…20
"I tug each blade to wed / the blade in front of it, chain links of chlorophyll / iron When I sway we all do, chain reaction / of nature’s bodies"
"I have carried this story, named and fed it, / though it did not survive. / I name its absence now: shape of shoulders, / bed of breasts, sleeping breaths."
"Fear kisses me awake. The panic of other / bodies, suddenly exposed, / holds my own."
"I’ll be candlelight / until I’m not. / You will invent / electric unseen futures, make light flood / your own rooms."
Click Titles to Read
Henry David Thoreau tells us to "resign [ourselves] to the influence of the earth", the passings of seasons, whether sorrowful or maddening. Rilke writes we should not shun these sorrows, as we don't know "what work they are accomplishing" within us.
This issue is Autumn― the turning of the world, the nature of all things. Rilke tells us to live the questions, so that we may find ourselves in the answer. These pieces are records of becoming, of arriving at the edge of answers we seek. Amidst the mourning, regrets, and resignation that come with decay, we find ourselves clearing away a space― Held fast by the insistent murmurs of a new world, waiting to begin.
“Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
"I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, Eyes;
I wonder if It weighs like Mine,
Or has an Easier size."
― Emily Dickinson
“I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”
―
“I circle around God, that primordial tower.
I have been circling for thousands of years,
and I still don't know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?"
― Rainer Maria Rilke
“Together in our house, in the firelight, we are the world made small.”
― Jennifer Donnelly
"And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.”
― Emily Dickinson
“If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”
― Henry David Thoreau
“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien
Edited by Dilara Sümbül, Olga Musial, Crystal Peng, Nandini Rabindra Maharana, & Kai Van Ginkel. Read by Angel Zhao, Ange Young, and Audrey Snow Matzke.
Copyright © 2025 Flat Ink Magazine