October 2026 | poetry
Waste Management
At five o’clock in the morning
I am awakened by a distant thunder.
Rather, by a sound like approaching thunder
heard at a distance of five or so miles.
But there is six inches of snow on the ground,
temperature in single digits. Could this be it,
my first bomb cyclone? No luck. I watch
as a garbage truck empties it’s green, steel
boxes at the township primary school
across the road. Long, forklift arms raise
the bins over the compactor—like a wrestler
poised to body slam a heel or fling
him over the ropes. Out fall milk cartons,
pencil sharpener grindings, flattened
juice pouches, Kleenex wads, more treacly
silt they can’t recycle. The lids dangle
aloft, shivering the backstage sound effects
that woke me. My alarm would allow another
hour but I start coffee, nurse my chagrin
that the newest weather phenomenon
was just more landfill. At least
the polar vortex is quiet.
Chris Dungey
Chris Dungey is a retired autoworker in Michigan. He rides a mountain bike to work on his fupa and a Honda Ruckus for the planet. More than 160 of his poems have found publication in litmags and online, most recently in Thimble Lit Mag, Penman Review, Argyle Review, and Macrame Review.
October 2026 | poetry
It’s Not a War
What’s inside me? Surgery clips, a stent trail,
stones, plastic. All the people inside me are
clamoring to get out, sliding little doors open
in my belly, lurching onto the bed, red dressed,
blue uniformed, drums throbbing, trumpets lifting
and blaring. That’s why I don’t think of illness
as war: the anarchic little army on my side
get their steps mixed up and then forget to salute.
When I was a child, everybody had a doll
with a big crocheted skirt to hide a roll of toilet paper.
Yes, the toilet paper doll. That’s how I learned not to
love my belongings. Who needs a clock striking
and striking, new doeskin gloves. sad little parodies
of dress-up clothes? That blood in my urine. I like
to think it’s just an infection, something slipped into
my body. Decades ago the tip of a Foley catheter bounced
in my bladder for three years. A nurse didn’t notice it
when she smoothly pulled out the catheter. It was bad luck,
not some lost battle. I got the crumbs that slid off a table.
I got the duck bone, white in my broth. The forecast is
healing. I admit that’s only a theory, a grasping at straws.
But there’s no need to wash my hands of hope. I read
about a tornado, fires in New Mexico, smoke moving east.
l get it. I’ll breathe till I stop that breathing, turn to what’s
blooming, put purple blossoms into my hands. The dirt
smells like rain and pine fronds. Just beyond there’s a dune
and the salt-sand. Wind keeps shaping it. Spindrift froths up.
Barbara Daniels
Barbara Daniels’ Talk to the Lioness was published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press. Among her other books are Rose Fever: Poems and four chapbooks: Moon Kitchen, Black Sails, Quinn & Marie, and The Woman Who Tries to Believe. Her poems have appeared in Good River Review, Neologism, Rust & Moth, Lake, and elsewhere. She received four fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
October 2026 | poetry
Fireflies
Your eyelash fell
On my cheek
As we made love, you made
A wish
In another dimension
My breasts two full moons
I placed your hand on my belly
The first kick
Your eyes lit up with a thousand fireflies
I blew each candle out
Birthday cakes counting backwards
My eyes mounds of dirt
Yours, four-leaf clovers
I planted a periscope
In my chest
Now every day I’m telegramming you
My darkest confessions
Full stop. Expecting
You to drop my heart but
Every time I throw
You catch it
I know I love you I’m jealous
Of the pillow crushed
Against your body when I’ve missed
Your bed too many days
Broken trust
Is a feral cat
On the fire escape
Waiting to be coaxed
Back inside
In this dimension
I throw myself down
The well of your love
Landing on a soft
Bed of wishes
Carella Keil
Carella is a writer and digital artist who splits her time between the ethereal world of dreams and Toronto, Canada, depending on the weather. Her work involves themes of mental health, nature, and sexuality, often in a surrealist tone. Many of her short stories jigsaw together into a magical realism narrative, and she is currently working on the connective tissue for a fiction collection. Her debut poetry collection, Undercover Butterfly, was published in May 2026 by Dark Thirty Poetry Publishing and is available for purchase. She is the 2023 Door is a Jar Writing Award winner in nonfiction and the Fall 2025 Cardinal Sins first-place award recipient in fiction. She has received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and is the featured artist for the Fall 2024 issue of Blue Earth Review. Her work previously appeared in Burningword 104 and 114, and in numerous literary journals including Columbia Journal, BULL Lit Mag, Berkeley Fiction Review, Ponder Review, Wizards in Space and Tangled Locks. Her art is featured on the covers of over a dozen literary journals, including Glassworks Magazine, Nightingale and Sparrow, Cosmic Daffodil, Silk Road Review, In Parentheses, and Straylight Magazine.
April 2026 | poetry
Cardboard Car Hanger
Its needle-sharp smell
penetrates the cheap shop,
the type where people riffle
through racks,
thoughtlessly throwing
underpriced things into carts.
Intended purchases left behind
in places different
from where they were picked up.
It isn’t supposed to be lying
between the car window screens,
let alone stripped
of its plastic wrapper.
In my father’s post-divorce car,
its cardboard twin had dangled
along with turns,
unexpected,
like the changes in his mood.
As I tense up,
my three-year-old squeezes my hand,
pleadingly persuading me
to leave
with Miffy-shaped screens,
the hanger staying
where it belongs.
Josje Weusten
Josje Weusten (she/her) is a Dutch writer/poet living in Belgium together with her partner and two daughters. She holds a PhD in literary studies, is an alumna of Faber Academy London, and teaches English literature and creative writing at Maastricht University. Her debut novel, ‘Fake Fish’, was published internationally by Sparsile Books (UK) in 2024. Her poems and shorts have appeared in various publications, including Litbreak Magazine, The Bookends Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, and The Brussels Times. In 2025, she won the Short Story of Belgium Competition 2025. For more information about her work: https://josjeweusten.co.uk/
April 2026 | poetry
Bettor in the Giant’s Den
The heart of the stone sweats
In the foothills of some place or another
(I forgot where now in Nevada).
The wet stone, moldy-in-sweat,
Moss drenched, marinated in
Fungus-warmth, red-splotched.
The casino is a lichen (or a mold)
In dragon colors and scaly,
Smelling of synthetic pine.
Somewhere in neon exuberance,
A casino ca-chinging or so,
Cradling addiction in the harmony
Of cigarettes and vapes, all tabac
And forth, back and forth,
Coral ashtrays, and a deck of dealts.
Tobacco and the backs of cards,
The intricate carpets like soil:
Straight spades almost flushed through
And digging into the foundations.
The casino sweats like a
Filthy giant lying down naked,
Slathered in Axe Body Spray
Lazing across the rocks.
Daniel Thompson
Daniel Thompson was born in Tübingen in the Black Forest of southern Germany and moved to New Orleans at six years old. He lives and writes poetry there to this day. His latest work can be read in The Banyan Review, Sojourners Magazine, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and will be upcoming in The Chiron Review, New Square, and The Delta Review.
April 2026 | poetry
Unfavorable Weather Over the Bay
All week the wind pushed rough water
up over the bulkhead, wave on wave
as far as you could see to the other
side of the bay. Buffleheads and gulls, unfazed,
bobbed up and down like surfers calmly waiting
for the perfect ride, disappearing,
reappearing. A week of alternating
rain and sleet, then a brief clearing
just in time for one riotous sunset.
Overnight the wind did its best
to blow the house down; the sudden onset
of a wintery squall was the final test,
splatting windows with wet snow that obscured
the bay, then froze on power lines, knocking
out traffic lights along the Boulevard –
but it was our boiler’s failure that finally sent us packing
back to the city, the car’s heat cranked full blast,
wipers going like the dickens, the boys
asleep in the back seat, and you driving fast
as if we could somehow outrun this winter malaise.
Brooke Wiese
Brooke Wiese’s work has appeared most recently in Snakeskin, Persimmon Tree, The Orchards, The Road Not Taken, Voices and Visions Journal, New Lyre, and Spoon River Poetry Review. Her second chapbook, Memento Mori, is available from Finishing Line Press, and a third, Allen Ginsberg is a Mensch, is now out from Bottlecap Press. After a very long hiatus, she has been writing furiously again. Brooke lives with her wife and sons in New York City and currently teaches at a special education inclusion school in Manhattan to high school students of all abilities. www.mbrookewiese.net
