FIRST LITERARY REVIEW-EAST
SEPTEMBER 2024
If it’s light, it’s light.
If it’s darkness,
you don’t know what it is,
the old monk said.
—Tom Montag
Tom Montag is a middlewestern poet who wouldn’t have much to write about if he couldn't read upside-down, didn't eavesdrop shamelessly in small-town cafés, and did listen to the voices in his head. The “old monk” is one of those latter ones. Seventy At Seventy and The River Will Tell You are his most recent books of poetry.
Honey
Summer floods a fallow field with muggy light.
The bees are drunk with scent, wobble airborne, head to their skep.
Stranger, drink deep from this friendly mead, raise your foaming tankard,
kiss, dare and rejoice on the edge of the void.
The goddess smiles.
—Heather Ferguson
(previously published in the monthly newsletter of the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House of Provincetown in March 2022)
Heather Ferguson is the author of A Mouse in a Top Hat (Rideau Review Press) and The Lapidary (Ygdrasil: A Journal of the Literary Arts). The Lapidary was translated into Spanish and French and published as The Lapidary / Le Lapidaire (Vermillon). Heather and Jack R. Wesdorp wrote The Bestiary (Ygdrasil) and two collaborative sequences (Appearances Green Arts Festival, Provincetown, MA). Heather and American artist Jeffrey Lipsky, as Petrichor ArtLab, published a sequence in Experiment-O, Issue 10, and two poems in the May 2018 anniversary issue of Ygdrasil. Heather is currently writing poetry for the Unitarian Universalists of Provincetown, MA.
Wee Hours
To the night person
one day said the sun:
You don’t like the day;
though you have the right
to prefer the night
I take it as a slight.
—David Francis
David Francis has produced six music albums, one of poetry, Always/Far: a chapbook of lyrics and drawings, Poems from Argentina (Kelsay Books), and New York Revery (Cyberwit.net). He has written and directed the autobiographical films Village Folksinger (2013) and Memory Journey (2018). His verse and short stories have appeared in a number of journals. www.davidfrancismusic.com
(Haiku)
Hair rainbows our bed
Locks and tresses strewn in dreams
There, a pot of gold
Metamorphosis
The martinis before us catch fire
light the patch of heaven scented by their spirits,
birthing butterflies above.
winged, formerly crawling,
now briefly airborne.
—Jeff Santosuosso
Jeff Santosuosso is a business consultant and award-winning poet living in Pensacola, FL. His chapbook Body of Water is available through Clare Songbirds Publishing House. He is Editor-in-Chief of panoplyzine.com, an online journal of poetry and short prose. Jeff’s work has been twice-nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Comstock Review, San Pedro River Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, The Blue Nib, The Lake (UK), Red Fez, Texas Poetry Calendar, Pif, and other online and print publications.
Brigitte Makes a Decision
After Edward Hopper’s Study of a Woman Sitting on a Bridge in Paris
Left leg and right hand anchored
on the curbing, right leg dangling
over the spandrel wall, she looks
back at the City of Light and Luc
and then reminds herself the fish
in the Seine are always at peace.
—Joel Allegretti
Joel Allegretti is the author of, most recently, Platypus (NYQ Books, 2017), a collection of poems, prose, and performance texts, and Our Dolphin (Thrice Publishing, 2016), a novella. He is the editor of Rabbit Ears: TV Poems (NYQ Books, 2015). The Boston Globe called Rabbit Ears “cleverly edited” and “a smart exploration of the many, many meanings of TV.”
it's effortless when it comes
and when it does
i am laughing
kettles of mind-water
i should have done this
the first time
the world cried.
—Scott Taylor
Scott Taylor hails from Raleigh, North Carolina. He is a writer and a musician, and an avid world traveler. His short stories and poetry have appeared in numerous print and online publications, including Ghost City Review, Snakeskin, Oddball, Angel Rust, and swifts & s l o w s. His debut novel Chasing Your Tail has recently been released with Silver Bow Publishing, and his novellas Freak and Ernie and the Golden Egg are slated for inclusion in an upcoming anthology with Running Wild Press. He graduated from Cornell University and was also a computer programmer in a past life.
Stealing Beauty
Morphing through the atmosphere,
coming to a gentle pause,
silent tentacles reach for my inner sphere.
Hypnotised by the amorous games in the clouds,
Luna, you heavenly sorceress,
I need my beauty sleep!
Ah, but I'll stare a while longer;
beauty for beauty in this exchange.
—Leonora Ross
Leonora Ross is an artist and novelist from Western Canada. She enjoys writing whimsical free verse poems and prose, is passionate about the natural world, and is an avid hiker and an amateur photographer. Her nonfiction prose piece, ‘The Dinosaur,’ is forthcoming in the September 2024 issue of Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine.
Bright Flowers
the gap between our thoughts
original purity
a strange symbiosis
the woodpecker and the wood
her love language:
what's wrong with you?
—Chuck Joy
Chuck Joy, Erie PA. Publishing poetry since 1980, including short form. Current collection: Vinyl (What Why Aesthetics, 2023). More at www.chuckjoy.com
Semantic non sequiturs
Otherwise, there is no
otherwise, just an else-
where. No matter — both
are options, & each can
get you where you want
to go, even if you do end
up arriving upside down.
—Mark Young
Mark Young's most recent books are Melancholy, a James Tate Poetry Prize winner, published by SurVision Books (Ireland) in March 2024; the May 2024 free downloadable pdf to your scattered bodies go from Scud Editions (Minnesota); & One Hundred Titles From Tom Beckett, with paintings by Thomas Fink, published by Otoliths in June, 2024. His The Magritte Poems will be coming out from Sandy Press later this year.
A Walk Through Paradise
Wind ripples prairie grass. Tan waves of motion in the thirsty meadow of reality. On my side of the truth, I am grateful slightly over half the people sharing paradise believe in science, peace, and love. So many rocks, hopes, pinecones. An occasional small angel. At the picnic shelter a profusion of white paper flowers left from someone's summer wedding. The truth is far more beautiful than I had feared. And safer too. Carefully I open the day. Lizards and love songs, junipers. From time to time a hummingbird whirrs its irresistible arc: If you want to dazzle, then for God's sake dazzle. Undo the bridle of respectable indifference.
—Beate Sigriddaughter
Beate Sigriddaughter, www.sigriddaughter.net, lives in Silver City, New Mexico (Land of Enchantment), where she was poet laureate from 2017 to 2019. Book publications include a poetry collection, Wild Flowers, and a short story collection, Dona Nobis Pacem. In her blog Writing in a Woman's Voice, she publishes other women's voices.
This Old House
attic dreams
basement secrets
***
pretty little eyes
pretty little lies
—John J. Trause
John J. Trause, the Director of Oradell Public Library (Bergen County, N.J.), is the author of six books of poetry and one of parody, Latter-Day Litany (Éditions élastiques, 1996), the latter staged Off Broadway. His translations, poetry, prose, scholarship, and visual work appear internationally in many journals and anthologies, and Marymark Press has published his visual poetry and art as broadsides and sheets. He is the subject of a 30-on-30-in-30 essay on The Operating System, written by Don Zirilli, and an author of an essay on Baroness Elsa at the same site, both in April 2016. He has shared the stage with Steven Van Zandt, Anne Waldman, Karen Finley, Andrei Codrescu, and Jerome Rothenberg; the page with Billy Collins, Lita Hornick, William Carlos Williams, Woody Allen, Ted Kooser, Victor Buono, and Pope John Paul II; and the cage with the Cumaean Sibyl, Ezra Pound, Hannibal Lecter, Andrei Chikatilo, and George “The Animal” Steele. His artwork has been exhibited in The Museum of Modern Art Staff Show (1995), at Il Trapezio Café (Nutley, NJ), and in the permanent collection of The Museum of Menstruation (New Carrollton, MD) to whose website he has contributed. For the sake of art Mr. Trause hung naked for one whole month in the summer of 2007 on the Art Wall of the Bowery Poetry Club. He is a founder of the William Carlos Williams Poetry Cooperative (The Red Wheelbarrow) in Rutherford, N. J., and the former host and curator of its monthly reading series. At various times in his life he has been mistaken for being a priest, a policeman, a pimp, and a pornographer. He is fond of cunning acrostics and color-coded chiasmus.
hailstones ...
our eggs clatter
in the pot
heat lightning—
a hill town silhouette
against the sky
thunder rolls ...
my calming recitation
of the Heart Sutra
—David He
David He is a high school English teacher who has published haiku and tanka in many magazines all the world, including Acorn, Modern Haiku, Presence, Koko, Frogpond, Autumn Moon Haiku Journal, Akitsu Quarterly,Under the Basho, Bottle Rockets, Stardust Haiku, The Heron’s Nest, Failed Haiku – a Journal of English Senryu, Red Lights, Ribbons, Tanka Origins, Heliosparrow,cattails,Taj Mahal Review, Shamrock,Poetry Pea, Kontinuum, Chrysanthemum, Wales Haiku Journal, The Bamboo Hut, Haiku Scotland, Free XpresSion, Kokako, and others. He has also published short stories.
Late in Ordinary Time
One white-haired dandelion: a globe of soft stars
That a stone has spared from the wind's loud wars.
He Remembers an Easing of the Sky
That summer, the world is dust and thirst
and no point in touching anyone.
A siren celebrates a wound with red slashes of noise.
The edges of fractures knit quietly in the dark.
Something vast and obscure and beyond asking for
soothes him, rain falling in a dream of rain.
—James Owens
James Owens’s newest book is Family Portrait with Scythe (Bottom Dog Press, 2020). His poems and translations appear widely in literary journals, including recent or upcoming publications in Channel, Arc, Dalhousie Review, Queen's Quarterly, and Atlanta Review. He earned an MFA at the University of Alabama and lives in a small town in northern Ontario.
Hopeless Man
Baby bird on ground,
struggles to beat
its tiny brown wings.
In a nearby tree,
a mother’s trill
turns to bleating.
One can’t elevate.
One can’t reach down.
Neither has need
of what I can do.
—John Grey
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, North Dakota Quarterly and Lost Pilots. His latest books, Between Two Fires, Covert and Memory Outside The Head, are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in California Quarterly, Birmingham Arts Journal, La Presa and Shot Glass Journal.
Strange Stranger Love
our last summer mooned about at all hours
spreading marzipan amazement over the music
houses like plump birds sang to us
you were strange & I was obsessed with a plan
sending flowers & dancing bears
breath smoking the lamplight
speaking the language of thick tongues
it was easy to forget what we came for
love is a shadow : how you lie & cry after it
your dancing figure rolling my starved skull away
into outer space
the hairs of lust : nothing : & this consideration —
a mind split by prisms
what I come to do is partial
partially kept
—Stan Rogal
Stan Rogal lives and writes (and other things) in Toronto. Work has appeared variously in magazines and anthologies in Canada, the US and Europe. The author of several books, he is left-handed and has never owned a smartphone, placing him among the elite less than 8% of North Americans.
Prime Time
October is a lousy month.
Where are summer’s dying moths?
I pour wine into my gaping mouth.
All the leaves are turning orange.
At breakfast, no peaches, plums, but a bowl of porridge,
not exactly what I would forage
if harvest were up to me. And the sky? Purple
and darkening early, like a bruise that signals
something's onset, a twinge in the supple
apple’s stem, just before fall. This morning silver
grayed the grass to match my hair and tourist palaver
on the radio. Traffic? A jam of leaf peepers, nature lovers.
—Molly Tamarkin
Molly Tamarkin’s poetry has appeared in many literary magazines, including Poetry, Sou'wester, New England Review, Sewanee Review, and most recently in the Fall 2023 issue of Acumen, which resulted in a Pushcart nomination. She received her MFA from the University of Florida and is currently finishing a novel based on her time in Saudi Arabia as well as editing the collected poems of Robert Boardman Vaughn.
The Empty Heart
Days brim with the missing muse,
ideas swirl and the ear tunes in to
every word spoken by not only people
but the chirps and buzz and scampering sounds
that imbue every lyric line break.
Words must stun and strum
to the beat of what a poet muses on—
our collective stunned grief,
that rigid, slow smack of an empty heart
pounding in the presence of the air we breathe,
when breathing is all that is possible.
—Laurie Kuntz
Laurie Kuntz has been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes and two Best of the Net Prizes. She has published six poetry books, her latest title is That Infinite Roar (Gyroscope Press). Her work has been published in Gyroscope Review, Roanoke Review, Third Wednesday, One Art, Sheila-Na-Gig, and other journals. More at: https://lauriekuntz.myportfolio.com/home-1
Pattern
I grew up watching
the woman next door sew
foot-size bows onto all
of her dresses, making herself
a gift, she showed me how
to be in the present
inch by inch
making it look so simple
to be prized
—Susan Shea
In the past year, Susan Shea made the full-time transition from school psychologist to poet. In that time, her poems have been accepted by publications that include: Invisible City, Ekstasis, MacQueen's Quinterly, Feminine Collective, Amethyst Review, Green Silk Journal, Flora Fiction, Last Leaves, The Write Launch, The Gentian, Across the Margin, October Hill Magazine, Litbreak Magazine, Beltway Poetry, Umbrella Factory Magazine, Foreshadow, New English Review and others. Her work was recently nominated for Best of the Net.
HAIKU: GOODBYE
Sears, JCPenney,
my childhood phone number that
died with my mother
DREAM BIJOUX
I can’t get rid of the necklaces
I’ve regifted. They all come back to me
in one box—flapper ropes of fake pearls
turn into snakes, each empty locket haunts.
All my pendants—pens making dents,
my pendulous poems no one wants.
POEM IN WHICH I CONSIDER STEM
My brain stem is a flower stem.
(Yes, I can say that in a poem!) Problems stem
from a STEM-only education.
I’m all for stem cell research
and research of any kind—especially
to save our environment.
Can STEM stem the tide,
by which I mean the actual tide
flooding the roads?
I stare into my stemware—
how precarious it stands,
like the stem on a musical note
between the head and the flag.
—Denise Duhamel
Denise Duhamel’s most recent books of poetry are Pink Lady (Pittsburgh, 2025), Second Story (2021), and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In Which (2024) is a winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.
Low Tide
One can faintly hear Circe's plea to Zeus spoken from seashells at low tide,
When a zephyr emits voices of sibyls reciting spells at low tide.
Aqua-blue & glints of green, a silver glaze of liquid salt–each color
Melts into the shimmering beach that reflects the sky's pastels at low tide.
Tell me of how sea gales rinsed the verdigris sky of clouds, of how my eyes
Held that sparkled hue from the rippling shallows where sunlight wells at low tide.
Shahid, your face is glimpsed in the rainbowed mirror of an abalone shell,
I still hear you recite couplets through the sound of pealing bells at low tide.
Terns glide in a trough of air, through the penciled light in a sketch by Vermeer,
Toward the Angels disguised as stars that crown the citadels at low tide.
—Steffen Horstmann
Steffen Horstmann’s poems and book reviews have appeared in publications throughout the world, including Baltimore Review, Free State Review, Istanbul Literary Review, Louisiana Literature, Oyez Review, Texas Poetry Journal and Tiferet. He has published two books of ghazals, Jalsaghar (2016) and Ujjain (2017).
All Me Again
I have recorded dark days
And kept them hidden inside sleep
Mostly, except for unexpected
Irruptions of disquiet.
Has that ever happened to you?
How much of me was my fault.
Now I can explain all I lost as
Consequences of my wrongdoing,
On treacherous, slick ice again
After years skating with big smiles.
—William Considine
William Considine writes poems and plays. His books include Strange Coherence, The Furies, The Other Myrtle, and Continent of Fire. Full-length plays include Moral Support and The Women’s Mysteries. Recent short plays include Odyssey’s End, John Milton in the Tower, and Oedipus in Love. Member, Brevitas poets cooperative. www.williamconsidine.com
There’s more to the Heavens and Earth
Please explain why do gray whales beach themselves,
flopping tails against sand until they can’t breathe anymore?
What makes earthworms crawl into puddles, dry in the sun,
forming alphabet shapes on sidewalks?
Why do ambulances race to suicide calls
to more million-dollar homes than poor projects?
Is there a particle of self-destruction within us all,
or is ruin our choice?
Why am I amazed how trees breathe through thousands of leaves
and sip water through a wooden straw?
Why am I comforted when morning light
breaks through clouds and curtains to warm my face?
What sparks my joy when my lover’s smile
spreads above a bowl of rocky road ice cream?
Is there a particle of bliss within us all,
or is joy our choice?
—Brendan Praniewicz
Brendan Praniewicz earned his MFA in creative writing from San Diego State in 2007 and has subsequently taught creative writing at San Diego colleges. He has had poetry published in From Whispers to Roars, Tiny Seed Journal, That Literary Review, and The Dallas Review. In addition, he received second place in a first-chapters competition in the Seven Hills Review Chapter Competition in 2019. He won first place in The Rilla Askew Short Fiction Contest in 2020.
Waiting for the Moon
waiting for the moon
it rises a lurid orange
its white wastes lit
by an unseen sun
splashed on a velvet sky
it hovers a curiously
unfamiliar object
certainties are abandoned
& you hurry from the hill
away from the sea
trying to quell
an atavistic foreboding
of inexplicable fears
& even the night breeze
rustling the dry trees
whispers of mortality
—Norman Abjorensen
[Editors’ Note: The poem “Waiting for the Moon” appears in the poet’s recent chapbook, The Taste of Rain, available on Amazon, which contains a blurb by editor Cindy Hochman]
Norman Abjorensen is an Australian journalist, writer, and academic and an intermittent writer of poetry. A collection, The Lives of Dwarfs, was published in 1988.
Friendly Responses
With regard to another person passing away who we both knew,
he says to me, “And one of us will be hearing of the other
passing away as well, but hopefully not anytime soon!”
To which I respond, “Maybe we’ll both go at the same time
so that neither of us will have to mourn the other!”
“It’s entirely possible!” he replies. “Entirely possible!”
—Jeffrey Zable
Jeffrey Zable is a teacher and conga drummer/percussionist who plays 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, most recently in Chewers & Masticadores, Linked Verse, Ranger, Cacti Fur, Uppagus, Piker Press, and many others.