PINS ON THE MAP

by J. Alan Nelson

 

After spending some of his prime years aiding German concentration camp survivors and guarding Nazi leaders tried for crimes against humanity at Nuremberg, a US second world war veteran is now believed to have become his country’s oldest known organ donor. The story of 100-year-old Dale Steele (above), who died in February after a head injury led to his being placed on life support, demonstrates how donors’ health is a more important consideration than how old they are, according to Live On Nebraska, an organ-procurement organization in his home state. “Mr Steele … is a powerful reminder that generosity has no age limit,” Live On Nebraska’s president and CEO, Kyle Herber, said in a statement. —The Guardian, March 13, 2026

Whenever I swear I don’t care anymore,
I open the phone, that glowing atlas,
and touch the red pins I dropped like blood drops
across the skin of the world.

One for the women I fucked in borrowed rooms,
their breath hot against my neck, thighs parting
like pages in a book I never finished reading.
One where Father left the dog behind,
old mutt howling at the empty driveway,
a childhood door slammed shut forever.

One where I straddled a pine like Frost’s secret rider,
sap sticky on my palms, wind laughing through needles.
One where I held the knife above an evil man’s throat,
his wife asleep beside him, innocent as milk,
and mercy rose up, sour and sudden,
and I walked away empty-handed.

One for the half-mile district win,
lungs burning, crowd a blur of small-town faces.
One for the bear in the Rockies,
black eyes meeting mine, both of us startled
into stillness, two animals deciding not to fight.

One where I sank into Icelandic snowdrift,
white world swallowing me whole,
cold like a lover who won’t let go.
One for the switchblade in Mexico,
cold steel kissing my throat,
I tasted metal and my own pulse.

One where I crashed Clinton’s party,
slipped past Secret Service like a dream,
shook the president’s hand, felt history
warm and ordinary in my grip.

I pin these moments still,
geography of scars and small triumphs.

Late nights when the step counter mocks me,
a few thousand short of ten,
I walk the empty streets at ten p.m.,
beer can sweating in my fist,
streetlights buzzing like tired blues.

On my pointer fingers, tattoos: RS and LP,
right starboard, left port,
so even drunk I know which way the ship turns.

And somewhere in Nebraska,
a hundred-year-old veteran, Dale Steele,
WWII quiet in his bones,
gives his liver after death,
organ young as three, they say,
regenerating cells like a river keeps running,
old body gifting what still lives.

I think of him when I pin another dot:
a man who outlasted war, depression, time,
then handed over the soft machine inside him
so someone else could keep breathing.

The map glows.
I zoom in, zoom out.
Infinity folds in on itself,
tessellations, impossible stairs,
hyperbolic curves bending away forever.

Yet here I am,
walking home under stars,
beer almost gone,
still pinning,
still caring,
one small step at a time.

J. Alan Nelson, a poet, actor, lawyer and journalist, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of Net and Best Microfiction. He played the lead in the viral video Does This Cake Make Me Look Gay, the verbose “Silent Al” in HBO’s Emmy-winning SXSWestworld, and narrated New York Times videos on AIDS programs in Africa.  

PURPLE HEART ARMY VETERAN SELF-DEPORTS

by Morrow Dowdle

The quiet girl I’d admired on the playground

defended me against a boy with rough grasp  

and bad breath. Ended with her knee scraped, 

 

dark with embedded mulch. The boy 

ran, exiled from swing and slide.

That spring, I gave her a locket 

 

from the five and ten, real sterling plate. 

Not a partial heart, with zig-zag edges, 

I trusted her to take the whole. And wasn’t she 

 

the bearer of some universal principle:

What you shed for someone incurred a debt.

In the military, I spilled not one red drop—

 

still, the discharge, honorable. Still, years later, 

thanked by strangers. What did I do? 

Sat in the clinic. Tried to save the wounded 

 

from an aftermath I could hardly fathom. 

There is a man, now, up in the air. 

A slick plane flung between continents.

 

My friend and I pricked our thumbs with a needle, 

pressed them together. Citizens then, of each other. 

Not enough to make a man homeless,

 

he must be motherless, childless as well.

His body belongs to no country.

His body gone, with its generous blood.

Morrow Dowdle is the author of the chapbook Hardly (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and has work appearing or forthcoming from New York Quarterly, RATTLE, ONE ART, and Southeast Review. They run a performance series which features historically marginalized voices and are an MFA candidate at Pacific University.

TROMPE-L’OEIL

by Suzanne Morris

Whenever I look at the

portrait of him 50 years ago

peering out from beneath

the smart billed cap

of his U.S. Army

dress uniform,

his eyes seem fixed on

grim reality:

he was drafted just before

his 25th birthday

during a war that he

already suspected

we should not be fighting,

and the casualties were

mounting at an alarming rate.

What a relief when he was made

a levee clerk in the Medical Corps,

posted at Fort Lewis, Washington.

Yet... sending others into action

while remaining safely behind

left its own set of scars.

Long after the war was over,

he suffered nightmares

of being under fire in Viet Nam.

I would lay beside him in the dark,

transfixed as he described

in terrifying detail

the first-hand experience of

a combat veteran.

This year I watched the

Memorial Day Concert on PBS,

with patriotic music and

stories of valor—

a resounding tribute to all who had died

defending American ideals

over the last 250 years.

By the time the show closed

with a haunting rendition of Taps

I was clutching his picture

against my heart,

knowing how grim

his face would be

had he lived long enough to see

the abdication of those ideals

by a President afflicted with

gilded bone spurs,

and thinking ahead to the

taxpayer-financed military parade

scheduled in Washington, D.C.

on June 14th,

a faux tribute to the U.S. Army that is

sure to make Trump’s pal Vladimir

red-faced with envy.

Anyone who dares to crash Trump’s

45-million-dollar birthday party

will be met with great force

as in the case of the protests

against his immigration raids in L.A.,

drafting U.S. troops

to engage in a war

they should not be fighting.

Suzanne Morris is a novelist with eight published works, and a poet. Her poems have appeared in online journals including The New Verse News and Texas Poetry Assignment, and anthologies including The Senior Class - 100 Poets on Aging (Lamar University Literary Press, 2024). A native Houstonian, she has resided in Cherokee County, Texas, since 2008. 

ONE BIG BEAUTIFUL BANK JOB

by Raymond Nat Turner

Humor Outcasts Cartoon, May 25, 2025, Written by: Paul Lander; Artist: Dan McConnell

Masked. Armed to the teeth. Synchronized
Rolexes. They left Lamborghini and Maserati
Motors purring… softly in the shadows on 
Capitalist Hill

And then—suddenly—in sonic boom unison they
Shouted at The People:
UP AGAINST THE WALL—MUTHAFUKKKAS!
GET ‘EM UP!         THIS IS A FUCKIN STICKUP!

Yo, fatso! Yeah, you. Waddle your way over to Senator
Sadist. You, on the crutches; swing over to Congressman
Cruel. Move it! Don’t make me bust a cap in your poor
Ol’ tired cripple ass! Did it in Afghanistan. Did it in Iraq.

Outta that wheelchair and on the floor, Pops! 
And, while you’re at it, gimme me those teeth.
Move it! Quick, fork over the hospice money.
Chop-chop, drop life expectancies in Golden Dome!

Hey, Bag Lady, drop those damn vouchers in the 
Billionaire bag over there! Yo, Sambo! Down on the
Ground! Keep your fuckin mouth shut and no one will get
Hurt … Well, at least until …  after we make our get away

Hey, Granny, gimme those meds! 
Hand over the Medicaid, ol’ maid.
Listen up, kids! Drop those school lunches in the
Billionaire bag. Yo, Teach, handover Head Start!

OK—simple-minded sukkkas—quick, up on your feet!
We’re breaking you for the billionaires; and Boss Tweet—
Robbing and plundering you, for the Murderous 1% Mob
Pulling off—yet another—One Big Beautiful Bank Job!

Raymond Nat Turner is a NYC poet; Black Agenda Report's Poet-in-Residence; and founder/co-leader of the jazz-poetry ensemble UpSurge!NYC.

REFLECTIONS ON FINDING MY MOTHER’S WARTIME CHILDHOOD HOME, NOVEMBER 2024

by Steven Kent

World War II Poster

My granddad went to fight the fascist terror;

To guard our way of life, he traveled far.

Democracy, he knew, was not an error,

Yet                            here we are.

Steven Kent is the poetic alter ego of writer and musician Kent Burnside. His work appears in 251, Asses of Parnassus, Light Poetry Magazine, Lighten Up Online, New Verse News, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Philosophy Now, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, The Road Not Taken: A Journal of Formal Poetry, Snakeskin, and Well Read. His collection I Tried (And Other Poems, Too) was published in 2023 by Kelsay Books.

NEXT MORNING TEXT TO A FRIEND

by Joanne De Simone Reynolds

Detail from “Morning Has Broken” (Oil and Acrylic on Canvas) by Brad Gray, 2017

I was despairing at 4 am—

 

I wrote the poem and sent it off . . .

 

I didn’t choose the illustration

 

Though I knew it was fitting a bit of a shock the bird a blue bird—something

 

Lifted—

 

My father didn’t serve in WWII

For freedom from dominance and division

For me to abandon the principle

 

The impulse—

 

That he passed away 22 years ago today on a Veterans Weekend is fitting—

 

What dawned in me this morning is what someone once called something like

 

Irregular reversal subversion—

 

What a morning like this one (not unlike the lines I wrote before these lines) calls forth or for

 

As if from a haunting (fathers poets birds)—

 

 

Joanne De Simone Reynolds is grateful to The New Verse News. This poem was written in response to her own poem published on the site on 11/9/2024. The words irregular, reversal, and subversion are taken from a letter William Carlos Williams wrote to Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry, in 1913.

SEA-TAC AT EASTER

by Jerry Krajnak

Fifty years ago, a boy returned

on a drizzly Easter Monday and found no one

to curse or kiss him. Holiday decorations

peeled from the walls as he lugged his duffel bag

to the gate of the final red-eye homeward flight.

On that eastbound plane no one asked

what he had done to earn that colorful ribbon

on his lapel or the metal pin on his hat.

Not wanting to hear about Vietnam, they looked

away from him as the plane sped on in the dark.

Only clinking ice cubes and the cry of a baby

welcomed him home on that dark United flight.

 

What kind of welcome will they receive next year,

all those young Russian soldiers, as they return

from afar? Uneasy and gone so long from home,

will they be thanked for their service to the state,

hear shouts of baby killer hurled, or worse,

arrive ignored by tired mothers and brothers

all sick of deprivation and numbed by broadcast

body counts that cannot be confirmed?

Will sisters and fathers and friends all cover their ears,

unwilling to hear what these young men would tell

about the distant place where they were sent

to do what leaders told them they must do?

Jerry Krajnak is a retired Vietnam veteran who lives in the North Carolina mountains. Recent poems appear in Plants and Poetry, Novus, Rat's Ass Review, Sublunary Review, and in the Flee to Spring anthology.

HOW TO SETTLE A PERSONAL INJURY CASE

by Gil Hoy

Find out what they lost.
Maybe it's lost wages. Maybe
the monetary equivalent of
a permanent scar. Get
the medical bills paid. Past,
present and future. Robert
was just 18 years-old when
he stepped on a land mine
in Vietnam. Fresh
out of high school. Had always
dated the same girl.
You'll need to establish who
caused your client's misfortune.
And how they're responsible.
Maybe they ran a red light. Maybe
they forgot to turn off the stove
when heating up olive oil. What
you're looking for is money. The more
the better. How much is the loss
of a loved one worth? And an
amputated arm? Robert's
girlfriend is now married. His parents
have had to move on. They keep
his gold star pin beside their bed.

These images provided by the U.S. Army Special Operations Command show (left) Sgt. 1st Class Antonio R. Rodriguez, 28, of Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Sgt. 1st Class Javier J. Gutierrez, 28, of San Antonio, Texas, who died Feb. 8, 2020 from wounds sustained during combat operations in Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan. (US Army Special Operations Command via AP)

Gil Hoy is a semi-retired trial lawyer. Most of his cases were in the field of personal injury law.

MOVING GEORGE H. W. BUSH

by Tricia Knoll

I walked four miles on a gym treadmill
as the hearse moved to the airport.
I looked at Sully’s picture at the casket
and loved how his care dog loved him.
How voice-over friends said he was kind,
decent, a good man as well as a President.
I know made mistakes and told his share of lies
but not every day, not four or five or six a day.
He was faithful to his wife, a love story
that played out in public. Gentle.

I never voted for him. He signed laws
to protect people with disabilities;
he never bullied them. He befriended
people he lost to. He voted against
his party when the candidate running
shocked him. Yes, a man who owned all
the sparkles of white privilege . . . a man
who fought in World War II; a man
of that generation. The most despicable
President in history is invited to his
funeral because that seemed right
to a man who honored the office
if not the weirdo sitting in the chair.


Tricia Knoll's How I Learned to Be White is now available from Antrim House—and on Amazon. 

DEATH AND SALVATION IN NEW HAMPSHIRE

by George Salamon

'A cremation urn was donated to the Salvation Army Family Store in Portsmouth [NH] with an engraving on the bottom that reads “Richard L. Pettengill 1929-1981.” . . .  According to an obituary that appeared in . . . the Exeter News-Letter, a Richard L. Pettengill, of Newmarket died at age 52 on Oct. 18, 1981. The obituary described him as a brick mason who served with the Army in Germany and Korea.' —Seacoastonline, October 22, 2017. Photo by Rich Beaychesne / Seacoastonline.

He was a brick mason
Who served with the Army.
Death ended his pain and his life,
But his life was not concluded by his death.
He cares not whether marble adorns him,
His soul was brought across the stream
Where, at last, man ambition scorns.
In death, he calls no place his own.
Let us instruct ourselves to be still
When we should.
He was a brick mason
Who served with the Army.


George Salamon lives and writes in St. Louis, MO. He served with the Army.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE

by Robert Lee Whitmire

B-52 Vietnam

Empty sentiment confounds me,
irritates me, angers me if truth
be told, causes me to see red
but pretend it’s not red.
Today
is Memorial Day,
and I hear
‘Thank You for Your Service’,
empty words showering star-spangled
fireworks on endless rows of white
headstones marking graves
of fell-too-soon human beings.

Oh, say can you see the rockets' bright glare
As green and red tracers tattoo the air?

My ‘service’ was no service to anyone,
least of all the people for whom
I was supposed to be putting my life
at risk. I served hubris, avarice
and a white nation’s desire to beat
another nation of obdurate brown
people into bloody submission.

AKs, 16s, rip like shredding guitars as
Ribbons of cannon fire hurl from the stars

I was the lightning that set the house
on fire, that killed everyone inside,
then struck again and again
and again, killing  killing  killing.
I was a tool, an instrument, a useful
fool ‘serving’ people who shamelessly
drafted or coaxed me and mine to do
the unspeakable in service of the indefensible.

But you believe you are sincere and so you
thank me, and I say ‘You’re welcome’ even
though you are not welcome--but the alternative
is for me to explode in your face like one of those
‘Bouncing Betties’ Charlie used to salt
jungle paths. Or I might infect you like a
shit-tipped punji stick, or turn into a child
wired with C-4 running towards you while
I hide in the trees, finger on detonator.

And children of God entreat for their lives,
Himself in His Heaven is deaf to their cries. 

How does it serve you for me to kill
a child running to kill me and mine,
who is innocent of any crime yet must pay
for that innocence with its life?
How does it serve you for me to fly a B-52
over a landscape tens of thousands of feet
below, dropping stick after stick of
aerodynamic death, more bombs than
fell in all of the Second World War?
How does it serve you for me to kill
more than a million human beings
who did nothing  nothing  nothing
to deserve their fates?

Words, no matter how polite or currently
sincere, are not welcome from those who met
us half a century ago when we were young
and thought ‘finally, safe at home.’ Remember?
Did you spit? Curse? Call us baby killers?
Did you get on your draft-deferred high horse
and go sanctimonious all over our asses? Are
you one of those who now wants to send
more young people to fight and die and kill
more brown people because they won’t
see our truth?

Do not thank me for a service I did not render.

Moans of the dying fading slowly to dead:
Perpetual harmony of fire and of lead.

Robert Lee Whitmire is a Vietnam veteran, a husband, a socially progressive Unitarian, and a retired journalist, photographer, and social worker currently living in Maine and doting on his two small grandchildren.

THE PASADENA POOL ON WEDNESDAYS

by Jenna Le

“Dr. [Sammy] Lee went on to earn three Olympic medals, beginning at the 1948 Games in London, where he took home a bronze medal in the 3-meter springboard and a gold medal in 10-meter platform diving. He earned his second consecutive gold medal — a first for any diver — in platform diving at the 1952 Games in Helsinki. . . . At the Brookside Plunge pool in Pasadena, Dr. Lee, as well as other Asian, Latino and black men and boys, were allowed to swim only on Wednesdays, in a special session that the pool called ‘International Day.’” —Washington Post, December 5, 2016. AP photo of Dr. Lee in the 1948 London Olympics via the Washington Post.

          for Dr. Sammy Lee, 8/1/20-12/2/16

The diver Sammy Lee took home
two medals, two consecutive
Olympic golds. Our polychrome
America, our putative
post-racial land laves Lee with love;
it splashes pics of Sammy’s splashes
on TV, turning man to dove,
to symbol, as he turns to ashes.

But when the press says “Lee took home
two golds,” what does that word, home, mean?
Lee, born unto the styrofoam
and steel of California, seemed
American as one could get:
a scholar, athlete, doctor, spouse,
parent, and U.S. Army vet.
Yet, when Lee tried to buy a house
in Garden Grove in ’55,
he was told, “You’re not white enough.”

Can home be home if, where you live,
you’re banned from living, barred from love?
Had platform diving—Sammy’s sport—
not given him a platform, might
he still be roaming far from port,
a homeless wanderer in the night?

Jenna Le is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Anchor & Plume Press, 2016). Her poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and translations appear or are forthcoming in AGNI Online, Bellevue Literary Review, The Best of the Raintown Review, Denver Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, The Village Voice, and elsewhere.

SALIENTS

by Mara Adamitz Scrupe

Adamitz Scrupe's original drawings “Fallible” (left) and “What” are from a series entitled “Mourning Drawings”. More information about these and other artwork is available at www.scrupe.com.

                        in meth lab country              we shove rags           

                                                                                    in our mouths           

so nobody knows      we’re             abandoned   

lately I hear   more

            than I have in years in referendum’s         heat

so hot

                         we’re home-stunned/ advantaged still     

whispering/ triumphal:       if all my dreams         came true                              

            rednecks & crackers            & good old boys        

(accurate as anything           I guess) alongside my aunties & uncles

& first cousins left-behind Jack Pine Savages      if you’re looking up  

 north

            know a .22’s perfect for squirrel     dead aim blind

            sharpshooters           in this homegrown war you never

saw coming    & the angels of our better natures shift

                        to snipers/ take the blunt/ try hard          not to die

 (for whatever that’s worth)                        & journalists opine

            & pundits outline options    it won’t last    long    

or        get off your over-educated asses       & rumble        

                                    respectively

            & the spotlight's on misfits & white woman renegades & lip

service & the other audience/ the other side/ half          over the shoulder

                        patriots           ever bruise-less         ever unblemished

 cocksure until                       

            today the tree guy I’ve known since he was a twelve year old kid                 

                     came by (& Iraq        & Afghanistan  & a bad attitude)

stands at my door  we two in-country real-life rural witnessers       

            we in the fire             we       waiting it out in a gale hermetic

as felted wool            we two     fixed        in the blind spot      

                                                            our salients                spelled out

Mara Adamitz Scrupe is a writer and visual artist. She was born and raised in Minnesota and has lived in Virginia for the past thirty years. While both her home and her adopted States went for the Democratic candidate, she’s pretty sure almost all of her relatives voted Republican.

AT THE FUNERAL OF A VIETNAM VETERAN

by Jimmy Pappas

Image source: Wounded Times

They did a study about veterans' suicides you know,
counted them and came up with an average: 22 per day.

Something like how many clowns can fit into a Volkswagen,
or how many hot dogs a person can eat without throwing up.

That's like saying, After you finish watching football today,
one veteran's going to blow his brains out, another one's going

to hang herself from the rafters if she can figure out
if she has any rafters to hang from in the first place.

The formality makes me want to put out a call for
the wailing women to gnash their teeth and tug at their hair.

The minister stands out from the crowd of leather-jacketed vets
with his tailor-made suit and conservatively perfect tie.

He quotes St. Paul, If God is for us, who can be against us?
to a group of men who have felt the whole world is against them.

Then he informs us that the prophet Isaiah believed God's
understanding is unsearchable, but I need an explanation of

why this soldier took every pill he could get his hands on. If he
did not want to be a burden, why do my shoulders feel so heavy?

Jimmy Pappas served for the Air Force in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970 as an English language instructor. After his service, Jimmy received a Bachelor's of Arts degree from Bridgewater State University and a Master's  in English literature from Rivier University. He is a retired teacher whose poems have been published in many journals, including Yellowchair Review, New Verse News, Shot Glass Journal, Kentucky Review, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Off the Coast, Boston Literary Magazine, The Ghazal Page, and War, Literature and the Arts. He is now a member of the executive board of the Poetry Society of New Hampshire.

LITTLE OLD WHITE LADY

by F.I. Goldhaber

I saw you limp into the cellphone store and
beg for help with a phone disconnected by
a rival's service.

Behind the counter teenagers rattled off
terms you obviously didn't understand.
I called you over.

I explained in words of simpler times -- before
the clerks were born. But, despite a balance, your
phone had been turned off.

T-Mobile demanded more money, which you
did not have, to turn it back on and wouldn't
refund your credit.

When you complained, they called the mall cops to throw
you out. Your story angered me, so I marched
down the street with you.

On the way to another T-Mobile store,
I learned you were a disabled Navy vet.
You told me stories.

When we arrived, I informed the clerk, "This man
needs his phone turned back on and I am here to
make sure you do that."

He looked in his computer. You showed him your
receipt. You stepped out to use my husband's phone
to ask for a ride.

He made a phone call and negotiated
with the person on line. You came back in to
hear your phone ringing.

I thanked the young man for his efforts. Thrilled, you
asked how I'd accomplished this miracle. I
whispered in your ear.

"Little old white lady," I said, much to your
amusement. For I can pass for white and took
advantage of that.

The clerks didn't see a man disabled in
service to the country they take for granted,
only dark brown skin.

As I left, I heard you gleefully shouting,
"Little old white lady." I'm glad I could help.
But, I'm not amused.


As a reporter, editor, business writer, and marketing communications consultant, F.I. Goldhaber produced news stories, feature articles, essays, editorial columns, and reviews for newspapers, corporations, governments, and non-profits in five states. Now, her poems, short stories, novelettes, essays, and reviews appear in paper, electronic, and audio magazines, ezines, newspapers, calendars, and anthologies.

IF WAR IS A HEADLESS BODY

by Diane Sahms-Guarnieri

Image source: Truthout.org via flickr

then what would you have me say
to this Veteran of Foreign Wars?

Retired military.  He’s living PTSD.
Attends therapy weekly.

Day by day -
dust covered cobwebbed dreams

spin into hellish-waking nightmares
filament by filament

each strand a broken memory.
War’s understated motto: Kill or Be Killed.

Served 26 years, since he was 19.
Straight out of high school

entered camel humped wars
of dirty sand and intense heat.

While in Iraq wandered
into their market place

into the minotaur’s “staged” rage.
An Iraqi (barely able to speak English)

said, “Chop Chop! Come on – Chop Chop!”
Communal eyes followed

a buff-built man dressed as evil genie.
A downward swinging wave –

one-cleaved sparkling and sharp cut.
A hooded head, beheaded.

As if lawlessness ended
with a thud.


Diane Sahms-Guarnieri, a native Philadelphian, is the author of three full-length poetry collections: Images of Being (Stone Garden Publishing, 2011), Lights Battered Edge (Anaphora Literary Press 2015), and Night Sweat (Red Dashboard Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared in a number of on line and print publications. Awarded a grant in poetry from the AEV Foundation in 2013; served as Poet in Residence at Ryerss Museum and Library and as Poetry Editor of the Fox Chase Review. On Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qir5_xPSNiU