FIRST LITERARY REVIEW-EAST
JANUARY 2025
Welcome to the first issue of 2025. May the new year bring you joy, health, and creativity. We hope that the wonderful poems here will inspire you. ENJOY!
an owl rang out — shimmered — then awoke.
***
Barely enough room for me
and the sky
on her
tiny
shoulder.
—Gene Myers
Gene Myers is a reporter covering disability and mental health for Gannett whose work appears in USA Today and newspapers across the country. He's also an entertainment writer, who gets to chat with folks like Steve Martin, Brandi Carlile, John Oliver, and Daryl Hall & John Oates. As a lit mag editor, he's had the privilege to publish poets such as Franz Wright, Anselm Berrigan, and Dara Barrois/Dixon (formerly Dara Wier), and has interviewed Jane Hirshfield, Charles Simic, and Coleman Barks, among others. His own poems have shown up in places like The Haiku Society of America's Frogpond Journal, a broadside from Joshua Beckman's 811 Books, Disco Prairie Social Aid & Pleasure Club by Factory Hollow Press, Paper Wasp, Chrysanthemum, A Handful of Stones, and the Irish Haiku Society's Shamrock Haiku Journal.
down the road
Yuba River’s edge
egrets
great blue herons
pose arabesque
***
a labor of his life
husband’s first book
I hold it
open to our story
so many pages left
—Diane Funston
Diane Funston, recent Poet-in-Residence for Yuba Sutter Arts and Culture for two years, created online “Poetry Square,” bringing together poets worldwide. She has been published in F(r)iction, Lake Affect Magazine, Synkronicity, and Still Points Quarterly, among many others. Her chapbook Over the Falls was published by FootHills Publishing. She is a graduate of California State University at San Marcos. Diane has spent her career working with disabled adults and at-risk children.
Gone by
of the old house
only a door
in its frame
still stands
knock on it
and enter openness
—Tony Beyer
Tony Beyer writes in Taranaki, New Zealand. Recent work has appeared in Hamilton Stone Review (US), and in Allegro and Littoral (UK).
In the land of Big Sky
gawking at grain silos
our new colossus
Barely a breath of wind
turbines have turned into
giant crucifixes
—Jiwon Choi
Jiwon Choi is the author of One Daughter is Worth Ten Sons and I Used To Be Korean, both published by Hanging Loose Press. Choi’s third poetry collection, A Temporary Dwelling, was published by Spuyten Duyvil in June 2024. She started her community garden’s first poetry reading series, Poets Read in the Garden, to support local poets. You can find out more about her at iusedtobekorean.com.
Condolences
Words cannot express
so please uncouple
their letters
and take them for
scratches on paper
etched in grief’s
abandon.
—Sharon Mast
Sharon Mast has been an academic sociologist and teacher of adolescent emerging readers and adjudicated youth. Her writing has appeared in The Cortland Review, Pacific Review, Topical Poetry, and Multiplicity Magazine. She has lived in New York City, Cardiff, London, and Wellington, New Zealand, and currently lives in Columbus, Ohio.
With the flap of ashen wings, sew up
at dusk and watch over, graceful heron,
the long sutures of the sky. It will reveal
dawn again, its roses
and its most fibrous scars.
—Erika Dagnino
Literature, music, drawing, and writing are deeply intertwined in the artistic activity of Erika Dagnino. She has collaborated with various poets and musicians in performance, as well as literary and cultural magazines. She is a longtime educator at state educational institutions. She comes from and lives in Italy. Further information can be found on her website: www.erikadagnino.it
Open Heart
My heart remains open
to possibilities and eventualities
unlike a wallflower who stands
on the observations’ sidewalls.
I’ve been the doer, who goes out
to help until my heart gets broken
then I turn around to repair
something outside my control.
I’m grateful to be me—
even honoring the broken places
where I invite the light to come in
during winter’s roughest of storms.
—Diana Raab
Diana Raab, MFA, PhD, is a memoirist, poet, speaker, and award-winning author of fourteen books of poetry and nonfiction. Her writings have been published and anthologized worldwide. Her latest book is Hummingbird: Messages From My Ancestors. (Modern History Press, January 2024). She writes for Psychology Today, The Wisdom Daily, and Thrive Global and is a guest writer for many others. Visit her at: dianaraab.com.
WHAT
what they see
is never the beginning
the language spoken
no more than a list
***
IF YOU
if you tell god
to go to hell
it's okay—
he's already been there
making arrangements
for your visit
—Bob Heman
Bob Heman's most recent book is Washing the Wings of the Angels (Quale Press). His selected early information, What Needs to be Found, is scheduled to be published by MadHat Press in May 2025.
Starting in Winter
Let the game start
with small words—
Storm. White. Tea.
Longer ones will follow:
Smarmy. Windy. Sermon.
Piling one on another:
Petrichor. Forgotten.
Epistle. Violence.
We will be led
along labyrinths to
arcane testaments
written on potsherds
by those who’ve lost
the masked name of apostle.
—Mark J. Mitchell
Mark J. Mitchell has been a working poet for 50 years. He’s the author of five full-length collections and six chapbooks. His latest collection is Something To Be from Pski’s Porch Publishing. A novel that includes some poetry, A Book of Lost Songs, is due out next spring. He’s fond of baseball, Louis Aragon, Dante, and his wife, activist Joan Juster. He lives in San Francisco, where he points out pretty things.
What Margaret Does and Does Not Know
During her usual morning outing
Margaret thinks of the relative weight
of lemons, heft of feathers, exact moment
a favorite plum tree will blossom,
marvels how rumination comforts
and derails as in walking an old path
in new shoes.
Crows know the way wind falls
yet Margaret can’t predict the density
of clouds. She overlooks things:
how a pebble is modestly brilliant.
Yet, as a watercolorist, Margaret knows
when to add salt to pigment. And this
she knows intimately: some days
are nothing more than a pocketful
exquisite shadows. It’s enough.
—Kit Kennedy
Kit Kennedy is a queer elder poet, photographer and blogger living in Walnut Creek, CA. She serves as Poet-in Residence at SF Bay Times and Resident Poet at Ebenezer Lutheran herchurch. Work has appeared in FLR-E, great weather for MEDIA, Shot Glass Journal, Gyroscope, and Tipton Poetry Journal, among others. Please visit: https://poetrybites.blogspot.com
Eluard’s ennui
Ennui imagines the skull of time,
and sleeps inside a storm made of shadows.
Ennui catches blind tongues with her eyelids,
woven from disheveled seas.
Ennui is a bouquet of weapons
startled by the clock’s soft veins.
—Alison Ross
Clockwise Cat publisher and editor Alison Ross pioneered the genre of Zen-Surrealism and the tenets of Zen-Surrealist Socialism, and uses those as her guiding aesthetic. She is a staff writer for PopMatters.
snow moon
a lie hung full,
the ground is covered
in nothing but the
worn soles of cheap
boots and crushed
plastic bottles,
valentines abandoned
on hooks, and winter
stays a broken vow,
the too thin blanket
that leaves feet frigid,
like the honeymoon
phase as a scrapbook,
as unencountered
blood highs—
the way we become
so brittle to fingertips.
—Kendall A. Bell
Kendall A. Bell's poetry has been most recently published in Ovunque Siamo and Nobody Thoughts. He was nominated for Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net collection seven times. He is the author of four full length collections, The Roads Don't Love You (2018), the forced hush of quiet (2019), the shallows (2022), and all of this bruising (2024), and 36 chapbooks, the latest being Blooms Of Oblivion. He is the publisher/editor of Maverick Duck Press and editor and founder of Chantarelle's Notebook. His chapbooks are available through Maverick Duck Press. He lives in Southern New Jersey.
Charisma
you are a beautiful ship
sides of polished teak
name worked in silver
moored a bit apart
I feel your wild heart
tempered by tenderness
may I come closer
will you sing to me?
—Ann Wehrman
Ann Wehrman is a creative writer and musician living in Northern California. She teaches English composition online for the University of Phoenix and the University of Arizona Global Campus. Ann's poetry, short fiction, and literary reviews have appeared in various print and online journals. Her chapbook, Inside (Love Poems), was published by Rattlesnake Press. She can also be found teaching yoga, reading, cooking, and playing her flute.
Growing Pains
Stretching yourself to capacity is the ultimate measure of being uncomfortable in your own skin. Allowing limbs to shape and break is like a molting that calls for a new way of life and wardrobe. New me, new Michael Kors. We’re at the mercy of ourselves when stripped down to our insecurities and innards. The term gut check was coined after a stoic man was told to dig deeper by his angry wife, so he grabbed a butterknife and stuck it in his stomach. Of the approximately 500 bodies found at the Crow Creek Massacre site, 90% of the skulls show evidence of scalping. It’s a myth we only use 10% of our brain. But it’s a little-known fact, taking the top of men’s heads as a trophy enables the fallen to feel the wind to finally flow through them as if their emotion were free to be expressed like severed apologies.
—Daniel Romo
Daniel Romo is the author of Bum Knees and Grieving Sunsets (FlowerSong Press 2023), Moonlighting as an Avalanche (Tebot Bach 2021), Apologies in Reverse (FutureCycle Press 2019), and other books. His work can be found in The Los Angeles Review, MAYDAY, Hotel Amerika, and elsewhere. He received an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte, and he lives, writes, and rides his bikes in Long Beach, CA. More at danieljromo.com.
Redemption
Without the Moon
the sea becomes deeper,
darkness falls and comes
to me,
I lean on the cross that I brought
myself
and I welcome it.
—Peycho Kanev
Peycho Kanev is the author of 12 poetry collections and three chapbooks, published in the USA and Europe. His poems have appeared in many literary magazines, such as: Rattle, Poetry Quarterly, Evergreen Review, Front Porch Review, Hawaii Review, Barrow Street, Sheepshead Review, Off the Coast, The Adirondack Review, Sierra Nevada Review, The Cleveland Review, and many others.
The Tedium of Human Relations
Grifters pour barium milkshakes of double talk
and diplomatic responses catch in my throat
like the trout bones I choked on when I was six.
Polite society is breakfast burrito of bald-faced lies,
a burst pipe flooding the bedroom with moral panic,
a hangnail of gossip catching on truth’s sock
before it puts on its shoes.
Dogma chews with its mouth open while
political correctness plants IEDs in honest discourse.
There’s a minefield of hidden agendas
at the checkout counter, a hundred pounds
of soggy justifications unbalancing
the washing machine.
The timing belt snapped on love.
My therapist offers me new pushrods.
Junk it! I’ll walk
—Jon Wesick
Jon Wesick is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. He’s published hundreds of poems and stories in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, First Literary Review-East, I-70 Review, Lowestoft Chronicle, New Verse News, Paterson Literary Review, Pearl, Pirene’s Fountain, Slipstream, Space and Time, and Unlikely Stories Mark V. His most recent books are The Shaman in the Library and The Prague Deception. http://jonwesick.com
Front Loader
Nightly, my mind sticks on the main wash cycle:
chapbook
surgery
bits and pieces of the new Emmylou CD
covid test
They tumble in a different pattern
every minute. So colorful
but there is no escape from this cycle.
I’ve washed them many times
but they haven’t faded. I try
to rinse my brain,
I need them to be gone
for sleep. I go to the medicine
cabinet for the spin cycle
to remove them.
—Barbara Brooks
Barbara Brooks, a retired physical therapist, is the author of three chapbooks: The Catbird Sang, A Shell to Return to The Sea, Watercolors. She is a member of The PoetFools writing group. Her work has been published in Remington Review, Field Guide Literary Magazine, among others. She lives in Hillsborough, NC, with her dog.
Party for one
The evening was birds of the riverbank, carrying off the stars, visiting together a faraway party in the moonlit ocean, where the trees were scrawny and tortured and nostalgic, especially at night when they resembled the feet of fallen-down canaries. A pilgrimage, then? O yea. Why not, then, give over to childish excitement, as if it was Christmas? Please, though, keep in mind the joke of a tiny bird, left behind to hold the fort, in a tiny silver suit of armour, polished by the campfire and sick of her song: the three-note echolalia-lalia that rattled her helmet, she’d sung it to death and upon toppling from her twig into the wet leaves, sizzling there with the persistence of a half smoked cigarette, taking it as read that she wasn’t alone, humming quietly to herself, a tune from the radio, and the river said amen to that.
—Johnny Elder
Johnny Elder of Melbourne, Australia, retired from full-time journalism after thirty-five years to write what he wanted to write, and to spend time in the local cemetery studying the territorial battles of birds. He is collecting stories about significant childhood encounters with birds. He persists with dance lessons.
Furthering the Plant’s Survival Plan
Hold a seed in a calm hand. Feel the faint pulsation
of folded-in potential. Meanwhile your heartbeat
pulses, pumping blood, and your nervous system
picks up clues of liveliness from all directions.
Hand informs brain of the buzz, but brain is
deluged with 11 million bits of sensation a second
while the conscious mind grasps roughly 50,
so you might have to jiggle that seed to feel it.
Meanwhile the earth pulses every 26 seconds,
blips in mini-seismic shimmy shrug, because
the sun heats stronger toward the equator. If
you’ve vaulted off clock ticks to earth tempos,
say several days deep into the Grand Canyon,
you can sense that pulse along with your own.
And the seed? Can you scatter it envisioning
the rampant leafing chorus that sings out oxygen?
—Mary Newell
Mary Newell authored the poetry chapbooks TILT/ HOVER/ VEER (Codhill Press) and Re-SURGE (Trainwreck Press, now from the author), poems in numerous journals and anthologies, and essays including “When Poetry Rivers” (Interim journal 38.3). She is co-editor of Poetics for the More-than-Human-World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary and the Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics. Newell (MA Columbia, BA Berkeley) received a doctorate from Fordham University with a focus on environment and embodiment in contemporary women’s writing. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Connecticut, Stamford and intermittent online classes. Her book Entwine is forthcoming from BlazeVox: https://www.blazevox.org/shop-1/p/entwine-by-mary-newell. Recording of a 2024 interview with the Brooklyn Rail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIIp-pbuSjM.https://manitoulive.wixsite.com/maryn
Snowdrops
In memory of Paul Berné
He loved this uncertain time of year,
when the willow fronds
turn pale with promise. It starts
with the knife edge of a winter wind
that tastes of spring,
the lengthening light.
The rains have come, and the moss
is emerald green.
Clumps of snowdrops
are sprouting in unexpected places.
Finding them is like coming across
an old friend after many years.
As if I were greeting Paul,
or glimpsing his ghost
in the delicate arch of each stem
weighted with its white flower.
—Anne Whitehouse
(previously published in Cumberland River Review)
Anne Whitehouse is the author of poetry collections: The Surveyor’s Hand, Blessings and Curses, The Refrain, Meteor Shower, Outside from the Inside, and Steady, as well as the art chapbooks Surrealist Muse (about Leonora Carrington), Escaping Lee Miller, Frida, Being Ruth Asawa, and the forthcoming Adrienne Fidelin Restored. She is the author of a novel, Fall Love. Her poem “Lady Bird” won the Nathan Perry DAR 2023 “Honoring American History” poetry contest. She has lectured about Longfellow and Poe at the Wadsworth Longfellow House in Portland, Maine, and Longfellow House Washington Headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.