THE ORACLE’S ALMANAC, OCTOBER 2026:
On Ghosting
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Walking in the Dark | Cécile Gonneau | Art
who among us hasn’t fallen like a leaf? | Avery Lark Steigerwald | Poetry
when grieving, learn an endangered language | Camille Josephine Carr | Flash CNF
Last Bites of a Dream | Elena Ergener | Poetry
Walking in the Dark, Cécile Gonneau
.˚⊹. ࣪𓉸 ࣪⊹˚.
Cécile Gonneau is a French-Belgian artist and illustrator whose work explores the relationship between memory, nature, and imagination. After beginning her career in marketing and advertising, she chose to devote herself fully to art. Through detailed drawings, painting, and printmaking, she creates poetic, dreamlike forest landscapes inhabited by enigmatic human silhouettes. Her ongoing series, "Les Fantômes de la Forêt" ("The Ghosts of the Forest"), invites viewers into immersive natural worlds where absence and presence intertwine, leaving space for personal interpretation and contemplation.
who among us hasn’t fallen like a leaf?
AVERY LARK STEIGERWALD
as autumn’s thin ghost passes overhead
i wonder why we call them leaves
does it have more to do with the fiction
or the falling?
etymonline plants a tree, leafing with language:
leaf (old english)—lauba (proto-germanic)—and so on.
branches stretch back to the old irish luib, meaning “herb”
and albanian labë, meaning “rind, cork”
the czech, leb, or “skull,” arriving, finally,
at the old english lybb “poison; magic”
two sides, a leaf has,
turn it over and find rot
turn magic over and find reality
transmute poison to find the antidote
turn life over and find death.
just as the dying leaves’ hue can turn
any which way
words, imbued with human breath,
carry mutability in meaning
reaching the end of each branch only leaves
me with more questions:
what happens when our breath doesn’t come?
what happens once autumn dissipates into dry-frost?
sometimes, we lose
a world
others, we just lose
touch
every so often, someone just
falls away
there is no language to say why
.˚⊹. ࣪𓉸 ࣪⊹˚.
Avery Lark Steigerwald is a poet from the Jersey Shore. Their work can be found in HAD and Soup Can Magazine. They are currently working on their forthcoming chapbook.
when grieving, learn an endangered language
CAMILLE JOSEPHINE CARR
please find my deepest widest craggiest snottiest most expansive sympathies attached below.
i am sorry for the three days of bereavement leave, for the debt collectors, for the normies. and also, for your loss please know, dear griever, no one is lost forever. the veil is thin and there are portals everywhere. i promise.
in the saturday morning Na Gaeil Chicago beginner Irish language class, i am the fifth best student. After Leo, Mila, Aoibhe, and Lola. Leo has 600 days on Duolingo in Irish and Lola has very nice teeth. i do not know simple prepositions or how to conjugate a verb. i use this ancient language, the language of my great grandmother-my baby cousin-the seventh son of the seventh son to do something much cooler. i speak to the dead.
i visit my dad. the multiple myeloma has not snapped his sternum, fractured his spine, or clouded his mind. he is not worrying over the mortgage-the costco membership-my sister's medicaid waiver. he is not scratching -pressing-praying for more infusions-more sunshine-more time on cold spring days. he is in front of me with the crossword, basking in the pride of my cúpla focal.
brioscaí for cookie. dailtín for brat.
and francach for rat but also french person?
the veil is so thin. you never know when you may trip slip or stumble your way through.
in this land of honey and mead, we are beaming-laughing-living. there's time for it all in the day-week-month that's in it.
i promise.
.˚⊹. ࣪𓉸 ࣪⊹˚.
Camille Josephine Carr is a writer in Chicago.
Last Bites of a Dream
ELENA ERGENER
& now all the flotsam & jetsam of the brain recycled:
horsehair braided with yours & mine in the middle,
metallic in the late sun of the solstice, last time we
were together on the rocks. slip in & out of the water
like seals & bleed like the teabag i left dripping on
the table, wood stained brilliant raspberry pink.
trying to scrape it away, barnacle, tabernacle,
no i’m not going to go to church with you, nice
try. even if i do want to hear the ghosts they’ve got
sedated in there. even if i do want to see st. valentine’s
blood in a golden vessel. i’m making a practice of denial
& all that darkness makes it hard not to step closer.
now suddenly it’s new year’s eve, as it often is! don’t
ask me how, just rejoice! one more down! the movie’s
still playing through the bells, timing all wrong, mist
on the field that no one else is watching but me
& maybe you, opening & closing your palms around
two hunks of tourmaline, same color as my tongue.
one last minute, while i’m still warm in this sheet & the
rain softens the noise from the street, while the last sweet
line you sent simmers in the soft parts of my body, nosing
its way inside to melt & warp. last look at pinprick stars,
paper moon, nighttime sun, eclipse glasses shared with
our faces pressed close & then—blind, cold, empty morning.
.˚⊹. ࣪𓉸 ࣪⊹˚.
Elena Ergener is a writer from Vienna, Virginia. She is a winner of the 2026 Ireland Chair of Poetry Student Awards. She is pursuing an M.Phil. in Creative Writing at Trinity College Dublin.