A LATE NIGHT FAREWELL

by Indran Amirthanayagam

 

 

 

 

This did not have to happen.

It was not an accident, but 

a lie about costs and audience 

diminishing in the age

of the soon-to-be-built

triumphal arch, but 

then we would not

have heard McCartney

backed up by Colbert

and Costello, other 

musicians and friends 

singing Hello Goodbye,

sixty two years after 

the Beatles played 

on the same stage,

would not have felt

the audience

on stage, on television,

wherever the signal 

traveled, saying 

hello goodbye 

at the same time.

That my friends 

is the DNA

 

of experience, 

the grandeur

containing multitudes,

the contrarie states

of the human soul

and everything 

and every person

from whom I have 

learnt to get up 

despite the sadness,

to break bread 

and link arms,

despite the sadness,

to sing in the wee dark

and to disturb 

the demons and go on 

stronger together

into the new day rising.

 

 

Indran Amirthanayagam writes a Substack. He has just published Isla itinerante ( Editorial Apogeo, Peru, 2025) and White Space Sonnets ( Sarasavi publishers, Sri Lanka, 2025). His other publications include El bosque de deleites fratricidas ( RIL Editores), Seer (Hanging Loose Press),The Runner's Almanac (Spuyten Duyvil), Powèt Nan Pò A: Poet of the Port (Mad Hat), and Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (Broadstone Books). He is the translator of Kenia Cano’s Animal For The Eyes (Dialogos Books) and Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly, hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube, and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions. 

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 Shindig 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.

THE PATTIE BOYD COLLECTION AT CHRISTIE’S

by Jacqueline Coleman-Fried

 

 

Dear Beatles fans,

 

You may picture me as a saucer-eyed flower 

child with golden hair and thigh-high skirts. 

 

I’m eighty now, a lot more covered, a lot more knowing—

 

yet I still don’t understand why George 

soured on me. In “Something,” the song 

he wrote for me, he said I don’t need no other 

 

lover, but that was a lie. You should know—

like picking bon bons from a gift box, he slept 

with any girl he fancied. Until he slept with Ringo’s 

 

wife in our mansion—

yes, I caught them in a bedroom.

Eric, my second husband, pursued me for years, 

 

wrote “Layla” for me. But he, too, couldn’t keep

his sex in his pants. And he drank. 

When he had a child 

 

with his Italian lover, while I was trying

to have a child with him, 

I had to go. Demolished.

 

My womb refused to flower for either spouse.

 

Reading their letters now, thinking

how they trashed my love, is it any wonder

I’m selling these reminders?

 

Old age is expensive. 

The doctor visits, the tests, the treatments—

 

Once I was a sylph with the palest skin and hair, 

too naive to demand more alimony 

from two multi-millionaires

 

who slayed the world with their guitars.

 

 

Jacqueline Coleman-Fried is a poet living in Tuckahoe, NY. Her work has appeared in The New Verse News, Consequence, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and Sparks of Calliope.

YOKO LEAVES THE DAKOTA

by Maria Lisella

Yoko Ono’s WishTree at the Museum of Modern Art, 1996.
UK’s Daily Mail broke the story last month of Yoko’s leaving New York City.

… to raise cows on a 600-acre farm

she & Beatles legend John Lennon

purchased 45 years ago, outfitting it

with a herd of 122 cows and 10 bulls …

a dream to live on land as his father did

 

with no plans of returning

 

their attempt to create new lives,

away from crowds, smog, love-ins

and the ceaseless need to be THEM

on West 72 St.—until 1980–

shot in the Dakota archway, Lennon fell

on the feast of the Immaculate Conception

 

with no plans of returning

 

Outdistancing his dad, 47-year old Sean

pushes wheel-chair bound Yoko

from stage to stage, celebrity galas;

she perches alone on the Marcellus Shale

plateau, protests “fracking” for the rest of us,

no longer hibernates in the sprawling Dakota

 

with no plans of returning

 

Controversial, she lived, starved

through World War II,

like a modern-day Eve, gossipy fans

blamed her for breaking up Camelot… 

she offered them her “wish tree” series.

Now widowed 50 years, at 90,

it is as if she has lived 400 years

 

with no plans of returning

Maria Lisella is the sixth Queens Poet Laureate and an Academy of American Poets Fellow. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her collections include: Thieves in the Family (NYQ Books), Amore on Hope Street (Finishing Line Press) and Two Naked Feet (Poets Wear Prada). Forthcoming is The Man with a Plan.

NUMBER 9

by Mark Danowsky





Communist Party cadres have filled meeting halls around China to hear a somber, secretive warning issued by senior leaders. Power could escape their grip, they have been told, unless the party eradicates seven subversive currents coursing through Chinese society. These seven perils were enumerated in a memo, referred to as Document No. 9, that bears the unmistakable imprimatur of Xi Jinping, China’s new top leader. The first was “Western constitutional democracy”; others included promoting “universal values” of human rights, Western-inspired notions of media independence and civic participation, ardently pro-market “neo-liberalism,” and “nihilist” criticisms of the party’s traumatic past. --Chris Buckley, NY Times, August 19, 2013


We know all about Document No. 9
number nine, number nine
details of seven deadly sins
who’s to know
about human rights
whatever you’re doing
the media has it wrong
but you know it isn’t
the unseen hand knocking
maybe it’s nothing
more than the past


Mark Danowsky’s poetry has recently appeared in Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Red River Review, Right Hand Pointing, Snow Monkey and The Best of Every Day Poets Anthology Two.  He resides in Northwest Philadelphia and works for a private detective agency.