No Crossed Words:

back to back, black ‘n’ white classics.
me, watching Elvis Presley singing Jailhouse Rock.
she, preparing the nightly crossword.
rightly, we each know that ‘history’ and ‘opinion’
are both 7-letter words but only one fits correctly in
2. ACROSS
leaving the other
1. DOWN

Simon Sweetman, c. 2002

This is the first ‘love’ poem I wrote for my wife. We had just started dating. I’m better at being a partner than writing love poems. This one didn’t have a title, and I read it one time, a few years after writing it, at a Poetry Day event where I was opening for Sam Hunt. I told the audience to write their ideas for a title on a napkin. Sam told the bar staff to tell me to visit him when I was done. We sat and had a wine, and he showed me a his child’s school classroom photo. He told me he really liked the ‘crossword poem’ so I hurriedly ripped it from my pages and handed it to him. I was probably far too enthusiastic about that, but he put it in his little suitcase on top of his son’s class photo. When I got back to the bar I was elated.  And then I saw that someone had written down on a napkin that I should call the poem “No Crossed Words”. That’ll do nicely, I thought. And drove home, beaming.
Simon

Simon Sweetman writes a poem every day and shares most of them on his Substack where you can also read reviews, interviews, short stories, and opinions. He is the author of the poetry books, The Death of Music Journalism (2020) and The Richard Poems (2024). He has written The Jimmy Stories (a novella in connected stories) and would like to publish it. He’s working on a bunch of poems about Harry Nilsson, and has a book of short stories almost ready to go from the MA he completed at Victoria University last year. But maybe no one cares about that.