CRYPTOQUIPS

by Steve Hellyard Swartz

“Stańczyk” by Jan Matejko

My grandfather, tears in his eyes, his false teeth in a glass of water on the table beside him, pounded the arm of his easy chair and screamed, "What does a man have to do to get borscht around here?" What he meant was "Why, when I was six, did I have to hide in a pickle barrel when the Cossacks came looking for Jews to kill?"

My uncle came into my bedroom and caught me dancing like I was on to the Beatles' “Twist and Shout”. "When you fall in love for the first time, you'll stop listening to garbage like this." What he meant was "Why am I working for the State when I should be a millionaire?"

My mother slapped my face when I read to her from a TV Guide that David McCallum, who played Ilya Kuriyakin on The Man From U.N.C.L.E., was America's new sex symbol. What she meant was, "Why am I not married to a doctor who hates football?"

My creative writing teacher gave my poems a "D" because the assignment was to write from the heart and I write from my knees. What she meant was, "You are not a serious person, and poetry is a deadly serious business."

My girl friend touched my face, looked deeply into my eyes, and said, "When you get tired, you look like Henry Kissinger." What she meant was, "I thought maybe you might be my ticket out of here, but you're actually more fucked up than I am."

My neighbor said that "If you look at every angle of what happened in Minneapolis, you can see that the Antifa girl was trying to ram the ICE guy." What he meant was the same as what I mean: the same thing all of them have ever meant, I have ever meant to them, all our lives long.

"Okay, enough. I give up."

Steve Hellyard Swartz has contributed several poems to The New Verse News over the past many years. Twice-nominated for a Pushcart Prize Poetry, he has served as Poet Laureate of Schenectady county in upstate New York, been a finalist four times in the Eugene O' Neill National Playwrights' Conference, and won a Green Eyeshades Award for Excellence in Broadcasting awarded by the Society of Professional Journalists. His movie Never Leave Nevada which he wrote and directed and in which he co-starred, opened at the US Sundance Film Festival in January of 1990.

LOOK UP AND LOOK OUT!

by Ron Shapiro

NASA estimates there are more than 100 million pieces of space junk larger than 1 millimeter in diameter in LEO. Approximately 500,000 of those objects are between 1 and 10 centimeters, and more than 25,000 of them are greater than 10 centimeters wide. —Freethink, November 29, 2025

 

On the darkest night of the year

when stars glow like brilliant diamonds

reminding us that we are indeed star dust

that has taken human form on this planet,

we should be grateful for the moonlight

under which tides flow, nocturnal animals

emerge from safe shelters and lovers kiss.

 

Look up once more then slowly realize that

what you thought were stars are actually 

more than 100 million pieces of rockets

and satellites, tools discarded on spacewalks,

junk floating in space. 

 

Here, on this planet, huge landfills stacked high

like mountains with 

    computers, 

    electronics,

    batteries, 

    styrofoam, 

    ink cartridges, 

    glass bottles,

    diapers,

    enough paper to fill several decimated forests

    and, of course, the toxic poisons released

    from human garbage.

 

The Earth is not large enough to handle this waste. 

 

In a world that can seem like a warehouse of commodities,

where capitalism begs for your dollars, once again 

human exceptionalism does not seem to care. 

 

Trash the planet or trash space, 

it’s all the same to those in power. 

 

And once all that space junk begins to collide,

sending more satellites into orbit will become

too risky. Without such devices to enhance 

communication, predict weather patterns,

bring about scientific breakthroughs.

 

Even the possibility of intergalactic travel,

the dreams of science fiction writers and

futurists, writers and artists, will fall into

darkness while humans, who once looked

up to the stars for hope and creative

inspiration, protect themselves from

any space junk falling from the sky.

Ron Shapiro, an award-winning teacher, has published over 20 poems in publications including Nova Bards 24 & 25, Virginia Writers Project, The New Verse News, Poetry X Hunger, Minute Musings, Backchannels, Gezer Kibbutz Gallery, All Your Poems, Paper Cranes Literary Magazine, Zest of the Lemon and twochapbooks: Sacred Spaces, Wonderings and Understory, a collection of nature poetry.

SHE HAS MY SHOES

by Ashley Nicole Nootnagel

Grey's Anatomy feels like my life turned satire.

I respect the systemic wounds opened to air

between the "pick me" lines,

but the trauma tropes stack so high

they topple over and kill off another main character.

Surgeons have all the maturity

of my teenage daughter in scrubs.

Icicles, plane crashes and bombs

are the hypotenuse of love triangles.

 

In one episode, Meredith Grey

fixates on a pair of shoes

worn by a woman who's been raped. 

I turn my nose up at the easy parallel we draw

to someone else's very real pain.

I still binge-watch the medical show.

Biology is a sexy spectacle,

like the poem stuck in my head:

On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs

trying to marry science to religion

and learning one eats the other

like a vanishing twin. 

 

Dissect the pig. Peel back ribs

until you can see the heart. 

I understand wanting that kind of clarity.

I've dissected a fetal pig once, too.

Those same cinderblock labs know the scuffs on my shoes.

 

Criminal Justice 101 discussed vehicles as weapons.

Responses ranged from "shoot the tires"

to full action-movie reenactments.

The former police chief teaching at ODU had only one word: move.

Don't let a vehicle trap your ego. 

 

But now there are nameless agents in masks

"Get out the car!"

"Get out of here!"

"Open the door!"

three voices shouting on Portland Avenue

three bullets to the head—not the tercet

or the pentameter you wrote about. 

With aim that precise, the agent chose not to move aside.

 

Lactic acid is just a byproduct in the lab

but in a living body it burns under stress.

There are some things

you're not supposed to say out loud,

 

like that we share a middle name

and a school, that our children know the grief

of losing a parent, that I'm thirty-three today

crying on my birthday for someone I've never met

someone they've labeled a domestic terrorist,

and I realize I'm obsessed

that you wear my shoes.

Ashley Nicole Nootnagel lives in Virginia and has a B.S. in Criminal Justice & Sociology from Old Dominion University. She works in human resources and is raising a daughter and two Australian Shepherds. 

ERASED

by Erin Murphy

​An erasure of “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs” by Renée Nicole Good (Macklin).

The original poem follows "Erased."

 

Erin Murphy’s latest books are Human Resources and Fluent in Blue, winner of the 2025 American Book Fest Best Book Award in Poetry.

*****

On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs

by Renée Nicole Macklin Good

i want back my rocking chairs,

solipsist sunsets,

& coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches.

 

i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores

(mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp—

the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):

 

remember more the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures; they burned the hairs inside my nostrils,

& salt & ink that rubbed off on my palms.

under clippings of the moon at two forty five AM I study&repeat

               ribosome

               endoplasmic—

               lactic acid

               stamen

 

at the IHOP on the corner of powers and stetson hills—

 

i repeated & scribbled until it picked its way & stagnated somewhere i can’t point to anymore, maybe my gut—

maybe there in-between my pancreas & large intestine is the piddly brook of my soul.

 

it’s the ruler by which i reduce all things now; hard-edged & splintering from knowledge that used to sit, a cloth against fevered forehead.

can i let them both be? this fickle faith and this college science that heckles from the back of the classroom

 

               now i can’t believe—

               that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths “make room for wonder”—

all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as:

life is merely

to ovum and sperm

and where those two meet

and how often and how well

and what dies there.

RISE, YOU BLACK MAGIC WOMAN

by Laurie Rosen

In 1692 Sarah Good, wrongly accused

of witchcraft, was hanged. Her daughter, 

Dorothy Good, also wrongly accused, 

was imprisoned at just four or five years old.

A week into 2026 Renee Nicole Good 

was executed by a lawless ICE agent.      

A poet, Renee’s power was paying attention, 

putting what she witnessed into lyrical, exquisite 

words that touched hearts, won prizes.  

Vance, Trump, and other talking heads

haven’t yet labelled Renee a witch, 

but they use hateful phrases to describe her–– 

evil, brainwashed, radicalized, disruptor, 

and domestic terrorist. They spread lies,  

pretending to prove untruths. 

They fear Renee’s strength. They’re frightened 

by her memory, anxious that our gathering crowds 

will confirm their impotence, reveal

their profound malevolence.

They’re not wrong to be afraid. 

Though they burn us down

with tear gas, pepper spray, bullets, 

slander us in kangaroo courts,  

they can’t stop seeing

our covens grow.

Our brew overflows now––

loud, fierce and unstoppable!  

Laurie Rosen is a lifelong New Englander. Her poetry has appeared in One Art: a journal of poetry, Gyroscope Review, Oddball Magazine, The New Verse News, The Inquisitive Eater: New School Food, Zig Zag Lit Mag, and elsewhere. Laurie was nominated for a 2025 Pushcart Prize. This poem is another in a series of  “witch poems” that she is writing. 

ON BITCHES PROMOTED TO FUCKIN BITCHES

by Michelle DeRose

Bitches bring whistles, not guns

to neighborhoods, with four-pawed

long-haired bitches in the back

of Pilots who wish to lick

six year-olds good-bye 

for the day, hope for walks

before they wag their packs

back home at 3. Lady Bitches

record, chat, encourage lunch,

smile. One proclaims no anger

at dudes, leaves windows down

even as she sees the threats

and lock doors. She leaps

to fuckin bitch by being so empty

of madness she drives him to it.

With bullets he wishes were his fist

he kisses the fuckin bitch good

night, hissin with piss that her cower

was inadequate, his power 

unacknowledged. He shows her. 

In this world all good 

bitches ride bullets to heaven.

Michelle DeRose lives and writes in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She is a poet and a mother; her son was once six years old, too.

JANUARY 2026

by Richard Collins

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

Crossing the Rainbow Bridge to Canada,

it’s a bumpy ride over the dry Niagara, 

only a trickle of red from the wound below,

flags flying overhead, the Maple Leaf 

at half mast on one side, twin U.S. banners

on the other: Stars and Stripes, and the McDonald’s 

Arch redacted to add the eight stolen

Venezuelan stars in cheap gold leaf

from Home Depot. 

         And the quickly setting sun:

a leering orange troll with an oily glow

screaming like nails on a virtual chalkboard,

“GREENLAND UBER ALLES!” 

Author’s Note: This poem evolved from the logic of a dream. Like others whose sleep has been disrupted by the Venezuelan violation, I found sleep subconsciously interpreting the ruptures being perpetrated against our allies. Thus the wound at the border with our northern neighbors, the flag of economic imperialism now adding the Venezuelan arch of eight stars, the threats against Greenland. The leering orange troll that keeps torching the bridges to our allies with inflammatory midnight texts will be recognized worldwide. The one hope: that that doomed sun is setting.

Richard Collins, abbot of the New Orleans Zen Temple, lives in Sewanee, Tennessee. His books include In Search of the Hermaphrodite (Tough Poets Press, 2024), and Stone Nest (Shanti Arts, 2025). His forthcoming book of poetry, Cartoons for the Chaos (Shanti Arts) contains his political poem, "November 2024," which was published in Clockhouse and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.