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 NEW DHARMA BUMS

by Bradley McIlwain 

When I could not sing

Drunk on disillusionment
And pain 

Shiva drank the poison

From my throat 
To free my spirit 

From city lights

That burned too bright 
My past cremated in ashes and bottle caps

Too much bar puja

Midweek between pints 
And poetry 

Searching for Kerouac’s

Drunken Dharma Bums
Looking for enlightenment 

In the Desolation Peaks

And the road is a ghost 
Holding out my thumb 

Like old Dean Moriarty 

The highway line a rehab
Of breakthroughs and breakdowns.

Enlightenment 

A bridge that burns 
At both ends 

And the only way out

Is in;
The only way to the universe… within

Hopping freight trains 

In early morning fog
The lakes and forests 

Of America 

On fire with desire 
Boxcar wine and scrawl 

Of poet pirates 

Prophesying on 
The great railway lines 

Swallowing the landscape 

Like a serpent 
Of what might have been…

Vasuki

Coiled in the winds 
Of immortality 

Carries me to the desert 

Of mirage and reality 
Of starlight and self doubt 

A new Mahabharata

Through doorways 
Of non Euclidean dreams

Where the chaos 

Of freedom is born 
In the dust of factory floors;

Discarded verses 

Rediscovered in dust 
Swept up and drank 

From voices with dry tongues 

As a tonic for the cause.
The well spring of hope 

Lies just beyond the sun,

My rucksack as heavy 
As the heart of the mountain’s back.

Bradley McIlwain works as a Teacher-Librarian, where he strives to provide meaningful and inclusive spaces for knowledge exchange and advocacy. He believes that poems and poets can be agents for social change. Bradley’s latest book Dear Emily was published by Roasted Poet Press last year.

ICARUS AWAITS A NEW YEAR

by Mary K O'Melveny

We’ve long been warned:

don’t fly too close, 

that sun’s too hot,

your wings will melt.

Yet here we are.

A NASA probe,

blinking distance

from spitfire flames,

solar winds, flares,

light speed heat spots

radiating

fiery dust rings.

As a new year

dawns, the Sun will

speak its first words.

Or will it sing

a scorching torch

song that sizzles,

blisters, sears, scalds?

What did we think

when we strapped on

those beeswax wings, 

leapt out as if

we knew our fate,

the sea Petral blue,

sun gold-glazed red?

Soon enough we 

will learn how far

desire can fly

before it burns,

descending like

a blazing star.

Mary K O’Melveny, a happily retired attorney, is the author of four poetry collections and a chapbook. Her most recent, If You Want To Go To Heaven, Follow A Songbird, is an album of poems, art and music. Mary’s award-winning poems have appeared in many print and on-line literary journals and anthologies and on international blog sites, including The New Verse News. Mary’s collection Flight Patterns was nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Her book Merging Star Hypotheses (2020) was a semi-finalist for The Washington Prize, sponsored by The Word Works. Mary has been three-times nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is an active member of the Hudson Valley Women’s Writing Group and her poetry appears in the Group’s two published anthologies An Apple In Her Hand and Rethinking The Ground Rules. Mary lives with her wife near Woodstock, New York.

WHILE STILL I STAY IN WONDERLAND

by Royal Rhodes

Companies Agree to Pay $19B in Opioid Settlement.

           —BioSpace, June 12, 2023

One pill

makes me lighter—

ether from Elysium—

seeing the world in pixels.

One pill

makes me forget.

Did I take this pill

already and even yesterday?

One pill

lets me blink

and conjure unicorns,
feeling sweat on my hide.

One pill

when I awake

projects old photos

of poets stifling words.

One pill

lifts me, another

drags me headlong.

Fear makes my mouth dry.

One pill,

the last, bestows

on me all I desire

most: a glimpse of nothingness.

Royal Rhodes is a retired educator. His poems have appeared in Ekstasis Poetry, Ekphrastic Poetry Challenge, Foreshadow Poetry, and other literary journals.

COVID-19 LIPOGRAM

by Martin Elster

Kay Scanlon / Los Angeles Times; Getty Images

Masking my physiognomy
may blight my glorious bond with you.
Your shroud, part of your armory,
brings to mind this bugaboo

bugging all of us. So now
as you and I chat through our masks,
although your orbs and striking brow
may knit or grin, a ticklish task

awaits us: To concoct a way
to talk with hands, with nods, and know
that you and I can simply say,
“I want you!” though our lips won’t show.


Author's Note: This is a  poem without the letter “e."

Martin Elster, who never misses a beat, was for many years a percussionist with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. His career in music has influenced his fondness for writing metrical verse, which has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies in the US and abroad. A full-length collection Celestial Euphony was published by Plum White Press in 2019.

I'M TIRED OF CONFUSING WHAT I WANT WITH WHAT I DESIRE

by Michael Brockley

Bibles with cherrypicked scriptures highlighted in red lay scattered along the culvert on my way to Casa del Sol. Border songs play on my radio. In a decade all the rock-and-rollers will turn out the lights after their final encores. No more rockin’ in the free world. No more trouble in the heartland. No more Ruthie in her Memphis honky-tonk lagoon. The waitress who serves a whiskey sour with my aroz con camarones is beautiful with her black widow tattoo inked down to her wrist and in the way she outsmiles Halle Berry. She wears a diamond stud in her pierced nose. Rides King’s Island’s Invertigo and Banshee without a safety net. When music award shows play on the television behind the bar, she roots for Drake or Cardi B. Says her mother bought records by Marvin Gaye and Otis Redding. Remembers wearing out a 45 of I Heard It Through the Grapevine one summer. I listen to sharecropper songs on the drive home. To songs by a singer named for a woman who rings like a bell in the night. A woman of constant sorrow who walks the freedom highway. I toss my dashboard Jesus out the window. The white Messiah. No one sings we won’t get fooled again. No one is running on empty tonight.

Michael Brockley is a retired school psychologist who lives in Muncie, Indiana. His poems have appeared in Third Wednesday, Jokes Review and TheNewVerse.News.

OUTSIDE THE DREAM

by Lisa Vihos

“If you hear the song I sing, you will understand.”

—Chet Powers (aka Dino Valente), composer, “Let’s Get Together”

I woke up today
so far outside the dream
I was not sure about up,
down, or which way
would take me forward.

There are days like this
when everything is changing,
and I find myself a bundle
of concerns, a bundle
of desires, waiting.

I hear songs in my head,
voices of long, long ago
of a dream that others had
and a world that could be,
should be, might be.

If only I would do the right thing
say the right thing, write the right
poem. It's not up to me.
I am not it, but,
I am part of it.

My job: to remind you,
you are part of it, too.

Lisa Vihos writes poetry in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Her fourth chapbook Fan Mail from Some Flounder is forthcoming from Main Street Rag in 2018. She is an organizer for 100 Thousand Poets for Change and an occasional guest blogger for The Best American Poetry.

MY LITTLE TYRANT

by Sergio A. Ortiz

Image source: The Onion

And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.

Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.

—Donald Trump

You stopped to desire what you looked at,

you stopped to invent what you looked at,

but you were never at a standstill. 

You understood the docks, the places
where salt is a blind lady seated on your soul,
where foam gnaws at the base of everything,
with its small teeth resembling
the quicksand of what is forgotten,
the sites where old anchors and barges
of oversize engines oxidize in droppings
of seagulls and pelicans, the small white tumults
where peace and movement intertwine
their nets in the old-fashion-way of the sea,
the landscapes that surrounded you
without you knowing how far from your imagination,
your most intimate arguments could travel.

There is a sky full of vessels that eyes contemplate
from below tears, from where your gaze runs out of breath.

An eternity that anyone could say,
is worn out by extreme use, fondled by the dead,
softened by the complaints of the sick,
an afternoon that is sinking like a boat
in a landscape that belongs to nobody else but you.

You understood most of this,
you distrusted your desire, but it was your saliva
that shone on the teeth of your desire,
you were the doughy dough someone chewed
the dough that ended up in your stomach.
It was your hand, the one with which you said goodbye.

That is why you hesitated in the middle of the night,
you heard the trees get lost in their branches,
you felt the wind halt, as if in search of something
between the folds of the curtain, you heard the dead
laugh in their holes imitating moles,
you will discover oblivion, let it walk into your bedroom
dressed as a butler to announce what is already served at the table.

Unintentionally you will dine with great appetite and at the end,
leaving the napkin on the table, you will praise the menu.

Sergio A. Ortiz is a gay Puerto Rican poet and the founding editor of Undertow Tanka Review. He is a two-time Pushcart nominee, a four-time Best of the Web nominee, and a 2016 Best of the Net nominee. His poems have been published in hundreds of journals and anthologies. He is currently working on his first full length collection of poems, Elephant Graveyard.

SOME DAYS

by David James

From Edward Norton: “I saw this story on one of my favorite sites, Humans of New York, and it moved me to tears. This man has suffered profound loss that would crush the spirit of many people and yet he still passionately wants a chance to contribute positively to the world.  If we don’t welcome people like this into our communities and empower his dream of making an impact with his life, then we’re not the country we tell ourselves we are. Let’s reject the 'anti-human’ voices that tell us to fear refugees and show this man and his family what Americans are really made of.  Let’s show that a country built by the energy and dreams of immigrants still believes in brave people who come here with hope for better life. Everything we raise here will go to help this family so that the father can get the medical treatment he needs to live and pursue his work, and his family can build a new stable life after their tragedy, and…as the Scientist beautifully expresses…to support his dream of contributing to the world. Thanks to Humans of New York for sharing these stories.  Thanks to the team at CrowdRise for putting this together and figuring out how to get even the credit card transaction fees covered so we can get the maximum to the family. Thanks to everyone who rallies together to create the power of the crowd.  If enough of us kick in the price of two frappucinos, we can probably transform the experience of this family and show them that life can deliver healing and kindness, not just heartbreak. Thanks to Benevolent, all donations are tax-deductible. We will work with Benevolent to use all donated funds to help this family and will seek to use any excess or unused funds to help the other 11 profiled in the HONY ‘Syrian American’ series."

you want to slam your car right into the punk swerving
over two expressway lanes as he sends a text on his phone;

you want to drink until everybody in the whole world
disappears; you want to look your boss in the eye,

quit, & then spit in her face; you want to come home
to find steaks on the grill, a cooler of beer & a beautiful girl

waiting for you in a bikini with open arms; you want to stand
at the top of Mt. Everest & see God’s face.

and some days, you want all the pain & sorrow, hunger & disease,
the wars & bombs to melt away so those of us left can sigh & hold hands.


David James’s third book, My Torn Dance Card, was published in 2015 by FCNI Press. His second book, She Dances Like Mussolini, won the 2010 Next Generation Indie book award.