Chris Dungey

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.

Barbara Daniels

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.