FIRST LITERARY REVIEW-EAST
JULY/AUGUST 2025
the Monet exhibition
in San Diego Museum
didn’t prepare me
for years later on
in love at the Louvre
—Diane Funston
Diane Funston has been published in journals including California Quarterly, Synkronicity, Penumbra, Whirlwind, F(r)iction, Tule Review, and Lake Affect Magazine, among others. Diane has been Yuba Sutter Arts Poet-in-Residence for two years and currently runs a live monthly open mic. She lives in the Sacramento Valley of California with her husband and three dogs. Diane has a chapbook, her first, entitled Over The Falls, from FootHills Publishing.
Ahead Of The Curve
I wanted to keep a head
to stay ahead
of the curve
but Magritte intervened,
faced me up
and made an ass of me.
—Lynn White
Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality. She has been nominated for Pushcarts, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. https://www.facebook.com/Lynn-White-Poetry-1603675983213077/
Crave of Thrills
Carnival ride towers upward
with steel spokes connecting
the ring of thrills.
A spiderweb breathes
in and out
with July breezes.
Fireworks explode
rainbow nets in which
we crave capture.
—Diane Webster
Diane Webster's work has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, New English Review, Studio One and other literary magazines. She had micro-chaps published by Origami Poetry Press in 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. Diane has been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart. She was a featured writer in Macrame Literary Journal and WestWard Quarterly. Her website is: www.dianewebster.com
Fable of Finding
—Jeff Burt
Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, with his wife and a Labrador that thinks she's a plow horse. He has a chapbook available from Red Bird Press, and a book due out late this year from Sheila-Na-Gig.
Soon This Kitchen
for M.G.
On the table
facing the muffin is a poem
the coffee gone to mud
no napkins in the holder
ceiling light flickering
its warning signal:
Soon this kitchen will be dark
nothing to read
no one to talk to
how will you stand it
—Susan Isla Tepper
Susan Isla Tepper is a twenty-year writer and author of twelve published books of fiction and poetry. Her most recent novel, Hair of a Fallen Angel, came out from Spuyten Duyvil in the fall. www.susantepper.com
these first-grief days
most of the day is spent
reminding myself to breathe
***
it’s sunny out
but the nature channel on my phone
plays rain
***
some days
I leave the paint on my hands
to remember
—Jennifer Gurney
Jennifer Gurney lives in Colorado, where she teaches, paints, writes, and hikes. Her poetry is widely published; two of her poems have won international contests and one was turned into a choral piece. Jennifer has four books of published poetry, My Eyes Adjusting (2024), Liquid Sky (2025), Love’s Echolocation (2025), and Light Matters More (2025, forthcoming). In just over two and a half years, more than 1,500 of Jennifer’s poems have been published. She is also delighted to be a guest editor for Haiku Girl Summer.
On The King Norman Show
I was seven years old
when chosen from the television audience
to guess a woman’s weight
which I unfortunately missed by two pounds
losing the bike
but at least getting a consolation prize
of a five-dollar certificate to the store
which I used to get a football
that I lost along the way.
—Jeffrey Zable
Jeffrey Zable is a teacher and conga drummer/percussionist who plays Afro-Cuban folkloric music for dance classes and rumbas around the San Francisco Bay Area, and a writer of poetry, flash-fiction, and non-fiction. He's published five chapbooks and his writing has appeared in hundreds of literary magazines and anthologies, more recently in The Paradox, The Raven's Perch, Hot Pot, Witcraft, New English Review, Uppagus, and many others.
Melusine and the Great Transparents
Painting by Kurt Seligmann
On a nicely set table, dishes
slide onto the floor and break.
The mirror reshapes me. I’m half
serpent, half water nymph. Born
inside a rhombus, my lines soften
and melt. East and West
lose contact. The clock hires
twelve diplomats to bring them together.
Sometimes I hang in space, ground
a story my parents told me. I don’t know how
to live this way—
or any other way,
a polished knife of chance
at my back.
—Kenneth Pobo
Kenneth Pobo has a new book out called At The Window, Silence (Fernwood Press).
We’re All Plug
Eyes and beauty one.
***
What Will Brooklyn Do?
Greenland plans for an invasion by America.
Canada is getting ready too.
Staten Island just attacked Manhattan.
What will Brooklyn do?
—Stephen Paul Miller
Stephen Paul Miller’s critical and cultural studies include The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance (Duke UP) and The New Deal as a Triumph of Social Work (Palgrave Macmillan). He co-edited Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture (University UP) and The Scene of My Selves: New Work on New York School Poets (National Poetry Foundation). He’s the author of eight books of poetry, including the forthcoming Beautiful Snacks (Marsh Hawk Press). His poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry 2023 and 1994, the Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, Contemporary Surrealist and Magical Realist Poetry: An International Anthology, and other journals and anthologies. Miller was a Senior Fulbright Scholar at Jagiellonian U. in Krakow, Poland, and he is a Professor of English at St. John’s U. in NYC.
INFORMATION
Even the priest was afraid. Even the door had to be explained. Even the trees were praying. Even the road was incomplete. Even the animals had learned to speak.
INFORMATION
The moon eats differently than we do. Its appetite requires the words the prayers carry into the sky. In its dreams it is the only beast that measures the heavens.
INFORMATION
The torpedo only sometimes a bicycle, only sometimes a woman carrying a box of books. The trees and the turnips and caterpillars worshipped as gods. The distance always only some counting. Their path filled with adjectives they are required to use.
—Bob Heman
Bob Heman's latest book, Washing the Wings of the Angels (Quale Press, 2024), contains a selection of his recent “information” pieces.
A Ration of Narration
And now he's gone.
What might that mean.
Declarative sentences
make the best questions.
He appeared to like
neglecting me. Though I am
persistent in reeling in
what I want. Further,
I have grown accustomed
to wanting what I have.
No already about it.
Ever heard of present tense.
He's gone like some germ
I never got used to
letting go of, if not healing
from. Pa rum pa pa pum.
—Sheila Murphy
Sheila Murphy’s most recent book: Escritoire (Lavender Ink, 2025). Won the Gertrude Stein Poetry Award for Letters to Unfinished J. (Green Integer Press, 2003). Won the Hay(ha)ku Book Prize for Reporting Live From You Know Where (Meritage Press, 2018). She lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Her Wikipedia page can be found at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheila_Murphy
Forest
The knowledge of after is hidden
from us
But the world we live in is here
for us to fathom
or try to This forest boundless
ancient cut down cut
down now what’s left alone
regrows Wildwood
alive aware a knot of kin
skein of seen unseen
—Katrinka Moore
Katrinka Moore's latest book is Diminuendo. Recent poems appear in Dulcet, Amethyst, and The Stillwater Review.
Gale Force
Silvery bird notes suddenly stop
sluicing down the currents
of the air. Hair’s spun
across eyes, approaching
lift-off, the froth of skirts
and half-slips bubbles
above knees. Leaves and dust
swirl like whirlpools—
the sidewalks scoured
to pristine mica-glittering.
Oh, could we undo everything
stodgily stable, start from scratch
with nothing pre-packaged, be wind-cleansed
of all assumptions, radically free.
—Judy Kronenfeld
Judy Kronenfeld’s six full-length books of poetry include If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024), Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), and Shimmer (WordTech, 2012). Her third chapbook is Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! (Bamboo Dart, 2024). Judy’s poems have appeared in four dozen anthologies and in such journals as Cider Press Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Verdad. Her newest book is Apartness: A Memoir in Essays and Poems (Inlandia Institute, 2025).
Sitting in silence
Gently opening my eyes
To the white egret
Curiously gazing back
Connecting without a word
The brilliant blue sky
Touches the azure water
While white caps of waves
Surrender themselves with ease
To the welcoming white sand
Wooden wind chimes sing
Each soft note randomly placed
Waiting for the breeze
There’s no pressure from nature
It’s perfect just as it is
—Helene Williams
Helene Williams is an emerging poet, photographer, and Reiki teacher based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She has been published in The Orchards Poetry Journal. Her work reflects a deep reverence for the beauty, complexity, and quiet resilience of nature. In her quiet time, she loves hiking with her dog, Jelly.
Roses followed them …
… across the Atlantic buried
deep in steerage, they survived.
Wild and common and hardy.
Roses know their place:
On altars
In gardens
In pots
At weddings
At Virgin Mary’s feet in May
At funerals, wakes, proms, communions, Mother’s Days,
Christenings, on night tables, in bouquets, boutonnieres.
Rose, rosa, Rosina, Rosemarina, Rosemarie, Rosangela, Rose, Rose, Rose
Wild and common and climbing.
—Maria Lisella
Maria Lisella is the sixth Queens Poet Laureate; in 2020 she was awarded an American Academy of Poets Laureate Fellowship; her work includes Thieves in the Family (NYQ Books), Amore on Hope Street (Finishing Line Press), and Two Naked Feet (Poets Wear Prada). She curates the Italian American Writers Association reading series in NY and is the poetry editor for Voices in Italian Americana (VIA, Bordighera Press).
Rinse Cycle
It is an unexpected accident
but you just won’t give in.
There will be no sponging involved.
I need to become
the washer on heavy soil setting
with half a cup of forgiveness bleach
along with liquid acceptance detergent
and the salve of fabric softener.
But first a good humble presoak
is required.
—R. Gerry Fabian
Gerry Fabian is a published writer and poet from Doylestown, PA. He has published five books of poetry: Parallels, Coming Out Of The Atlantic, Electronic Forecasts, Wildflower Women, and Pilfered Circadian Rhythm, as well as his poetry baseball book, Ball On The Mound.
Q32 realizations
Please move away from the doors,
O you gorgeous young Lululemon girls,
with your short-shorts, fake eyelashes & perfect hair.
Won’t you please give your seat to the elderly & disabled?
Don’t you see, o young girls: the old woman getting on the bus
hobbling forward upon her cane, every step is a painful one.
She glares at you two. You’ve taken her seat—she needs it,
but all you need is to cross the bridge towards Queensboro Plaza
(should have taken the N train), but everyone can’t control another’s behavior;
we only can control ourselves. Not everyone notices every leaf on a tree,
or could see grains of rice stuck on the kitchen sink in the dark.
Empathy is slowly learned. People can’t see what you can see.
Let it go—Get off the bus, go to work.
Look both ways, watch the road.
Look after yourself & take care.
—Carrie Magness Radna
Carrie Magness Radna is an NYPL audio and moving image (AMI) cataloger, an Associate Editor of Brownstone Poets Anthology (2022–2025), a choral singer, lyricist, and poet born in Norman, Oklahoma. Prizes: “all trains are haunted” (Non-rhyming poetry: Honorable Mention) and “May (a Pantoum)” (Rhyming poetry: Honorable Mention) of both the 89th & 90th Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition. “Pink (A Ghazal)” was the Third-Prize Winner (Rhyming Poetry) of the 91st Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition. Previous publications: The Oracular Tree, Muddy River Poetry Review, First Literary Review-East, The Poetic Bond (VIII-X) (Willowdown Books), Spillwords.com, Mediterranean Poetry, Alien Buddha Press, Cajun Mutt Press, The Rye Whiskey Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Nomad’s Choir, Jerry’s Jazz Musician, et al. Poetry collections: Hurricanes never apologize (Luchador Press: 2019), In the blue hour (Nirala Publications: February 2021), and Shooting Myself in the Dark (Cajun Mutt Press: 2023). She lives in Manhattan, New York, with her husband, Rudolf. https://www.carriemagnessradna.com
Hometown, Indiana
I grew up in a town where men were jailed for shaving their beards and mustaches. Where I learned to walk by strolling to an orchard where orgasmic blueberries grew behind a church no one attended. I planted rogue sunflowers in a gone-to-seed moth garden. Cougars prowled the bog hills south of town. We divided ourselves into weisenheimers and spalpeens when we pelted parades with tomatoes. Our faces blurred in photographs. Check-kiters and burglars with skeleton key tattoos. Flyover mudsills. Birds never nested in our eaves. Lightning bugs didn’t flash in the evening. I speak these truths from my hunger.
Photographs of North American Fruits
Madonna from Portfolio Three, The Work of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, 1964, Ralph Eugene Meatyard
The mother studies small photographs displayed at eye level along gray walls. Each picture is a still life of a fruit from North America. Pawpaw, persimmon, mangosteen, and cherimoya. At the entrance, the first portrait was a heart berry. What the Anishinaabeg, the First People, call the strawberry. Sunlight bends the shades that form an arched window in the corner of the gallery where the mother silhouettes with her daughter. Light gathers around the woman’s head as if she carries within her a small star. The daughter presses her face against the mother’s stomach, eager to resume their tour of the gallery’s curiosities. To explore a room arranged with faceless Amish dolls or to discover an opportunity to dress like Joan of Arc or Cleopatra in a four-for-a-quarter photo booth. Enraptured by the black-and-white still of a cloudberry, the mother poses motionless for the lifespan of a fable. The frames of a loganberry and a Juneberry passed over for the possibilities within the floret-like drupe. Neither mother nor daughter knows that the ripened cloudberry turns orange. Both wonder whether heart berries were the first fruit.
—Michael Brockley
Michael Brockley is a retired school psychologist who lives in Muncie, Indiana. His prose poems have appeared Down in the Dirt, The Hoolet's Nook, and 912 Review. In addition, Brockley's prose poems are forthcoming in Clockwise Cat, samfiftyfour, and Stormwash: Environmental Poems, Volume 2.
Archival Radio Silence Sampler
The apparel sniffer was here. A fine cur
After sundown. Put on your shopping britches, Betty Lou,
& Go skydiving. Nothing funny in that mirror.
How will you know where to find me if I am dying loam?
& If I feel all the letters
In the buffers of the lovers, will I explode with a gentle
Rustle of sandwich boards, knowingly, o Evening?
Your red shoe is twisted in my rotary canal.
I will be better in the sentence I want to bear like gloom
In your windy arrival. Crushed edges reasonably.
A spindly day, red as moon-stubborn whispers.
Stubborn mess quisling.
—Mark DuCharme
Mark DuCharme’s newest collection is Thousands Blink Outside, published in 2024 by C22 Open Editions. Other recent publications include Here, Which Is Also a Place from Unlikely Books; Scorpion Letters from Ethel; and his work of poet’s theater, We, the Monstrous: Script for an Unrealizable Film, from The Operating System. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, USA.
Leaving Condensation
tongue sticks
and strumming licks
put jam in conversation
rocking gentle
and elemental
to perforate
this hour late
leaving condensation
on the mind
to keep wet and hug blind
in this long solitude
where other things intrude
—Strider Marcus Jones
Strider Marcus Jones is a poet, law graduate, and former civil servant from Salford, England, with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. He is the editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal
https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/.
A member of The Poetry Society, nominated for the Pushcart Prize x3 and Best of the Net x3, his five published books of poetry
https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/
reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms. His poetry has been published in numerous publications, including Poppy Road Review; The Galway Review; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine, and Dissident Voice.
Prefaces
In my opinion, you are very strange.
In spite of everything, I think of pecan pie.
As far as I’m concerned, you are never going
to see the pyramids along the Nile. If I have
anything to say about it, I would tell you
that I envision you on a beach at a lake
in the mountains in the middle of the 20th
century and you are sparkling and startling.
In any case, wherever you go, the sands of time
fill all our pails, and the ocean comes right
up to you in order to lick your toes and
the soles of your feet. At the end of the day,
darkness cradles us in nightmares. In truth,
you never knew the way in or the way out.
—Terence Winch
Terence Winch has published ten books of poems, the most recent being It Is As If Desire (Hanging Loose, 2024) and That Ship Has Sailed (Pitt Poetry Series, 2023). Winner of an American Book Award and the Columbia Book Award, he has also published two story collections and a novel. Guest editor for Best American Poetry 2025 and the editor of the Best American Poetry blog’s “Pick of the Week” feature, Winch is the recipient of an NEA poetry fellowship and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing. Also a musician and songwriter, he co-founded the original Celtic Thunder, the traditional Irish music group, and composed its best-known song "When New York Was Irish."
To Babel's Builders
Neither do the lilies of the field do cartwheels, neither do the astronauts and acrobats as they wait patiently for vacant trains. Perfection feeds on imperfection of which formerly there was a bountiful supply. My other Doppelganger is in rehab.
At his stone-age word processor, what the swami sees is what the swami gets. I’m thinking of a relativity between the special and the general, the relativity that’s neither ludicrously large nor vanishingly small. As from one’s face one wipes a simile one falls
from grace. To Babel's builders only would I issue cell phones. Pick a card trick. Guess my origin and fate. Because they think there's more than one of them they'll synchronize. Their resting places made to look like cake, in the periphery they’re willing victims.
Wait, what were you thinking when you so emoted. A good time was had by all except the saint. I’m thinking of a mental state between hysterical and logical, between amenable and calculating. Guess my predilection, guess my mechanism, win a prize.
— Heikki Huotari
Heikki Huotari, on a hunger strike in opposition to the war in Vietnam, was court-martialled for refusing to eat. Since retiring from academia/mathematics he has published more than 400 poems in literary journals, including Pleiades, Spillway, the American Journal of Poetry, and Willow Springs, and in six chapbooks and six collections. He has won one book (Star 82 Press) and two chapbook (Gambling The Aisle and Survision Press) prizes. His Erdős number is two.
Observing the Moon
Moon’s optic disc stares down from a coal-black sky.
How its presence inspires haiku and sumi-e scrolls,
polishes granite and breccia at ocean’s edge.
Photograph the moon when full,
capture its rippling echo thumb-printed
on evening tides. Moon continues on a four
and a half billion-year-old orbit around the earth,
while we, Homo sapiens, having stamped
our boot prints into its skin, believe we own it.
—Sharon M. Carter
Sharon M. Carter is a poet and visual artist originally from Lancashire, England, who lives in Washington State. She recently retired from a career in healthcare. Her work has been published in Amsterdam Quarterly, Terra Nova, Quartet, Ars Medica, Raven Chronicles and One Art. Her poetry book Quiver was published in 2022. Ekphrastic Pastiche, a fusion of original drawings and poetry, was released in 2024. More projects are in process.
Life, insufficiently thawed
At once the light lands differently on the clouds at sunset the sky resembling a marriage between a Tiepolo and old
pastel marbles—impervious spheres, mystically sensuous, aiming straight— caught between thumb and forefinger.
Pastoral worlds daydreamed out of an 11th floor window into someone else’s heart, shooter orb masquerading
as pastorale above a gaggle of gazing earthbound cherubs.
Salutations
When you encounter a traveler on the path,
greet them.
Not because she may be
a God in disguise.
Not because she will give you
a fistful of magic beans,
nor because he will turn into your lost grandmother
and reveal some arcane but homely wisdom.
But because it is in your power to give
a beneficence.
Because the Chinese red blossoms of this aloe plant
are full of hummingbirds
and there is a fly on the window
trying to join them.
—Leslie Prosterman
[Previously published in Zen Peacemaker Newsletter (March 11th, 2025)]
Leslie Prosterman, author of Snapshots and Dances, most recently has published in Sense and Sensibility, Zen Peacemakers Newsletter, Live Mag! Axon, Unlikely Stories, Maintenant, and great weather for MEDIA. Currently she is at work on a new manuscript called Love and Then Tomorrow. At one time a student of trapeze, Prosterman now appears as a poet/dancer in vaudeville revues, experimental dance concerts, and on YouTube. A former associate professor of American Studies and folklore, she lives between and teaches community poetry workshops in New York, Washington, DC, and Martha’s Vineyard. Leslie Prosterman is a proud member of the Brevitas Poetry Collective.