Amethyst Review

Smoke & Mirrors 

In the yard of 404 Sheridan Avenue
Rests shards of glass; they surround the house 
Like the guardians of my past—marking the 
Semblance of a distant childhood
That comes rushing back to me as
I observe billowing, black smoke 
Pour out of my home and the scent 
Of burning chemicals and plastic and 
Wooden frames of a life built around 
Belonging hits my temporal lobe so far 
Back that I am seven and small. 
I am not a mother and pregnant, 
I am not a wife watching her husband 
Take a feeble garden hose to the
Back of the house. 

I am a child repeating, 
The Lord gives and the Lord takes. 
And as I observe the mosaic of 
My mobility, the corners of the map 
My mind has occupied, I find a 
Miraculous light pouring through 
Each shattered glass, glittering 
A promise of a fixed and certain home. 

Danielle Page is a truth-teller, educator, and writer currently hailing from rural Maryland. She strives to live wholeheartedly in her endeavors alongside her husband and daughters. When she’s not scribbling in her Moleskine journal, she’s tackling her To Be Read list, baking banana bread, or serving in camp ministry. She is an editor for the Clayjar Review and has been published in Ekstasis, Heart of Flesh, Vessels of Light, Traces, Solid Food Press, and elsewhere.

The Revelation of Colors

Time was, when everything we learned was new,
Like kindergarten, when our teacher took
Primary colors—yellow, red, and blue—
From pots of paint and beckoned us to look:

Add red to blue—it’s purple, can you see?
Yellow and red make orange—a dawning sun.
Yellow and blue make green—a summer tree.
It seemed creation could be anyone’s.

Like smock-clad little gods we tried it too,
Paintbrushes dripping, waved like wild batons
At paper stuck to walls with Elmer’s Glue.
It was, for five-year-olds, our Renaissance.

Yet some of us would later learn how art
Starts with the one Creator, as we see
What’s given life when colored by three parts,
Lighted by love, shared for eternity.

 

Steven Peterson is the author of the debut collection Walking Trees and Other Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2025). His poems and reviews appear in The Christian Century, Dappled Things, First Things, Light, New Verse Review, The North American Anglican, The Windhover, and other publications. He and his wife live in Chicago.

Epiphany					

It's here.  The final night - the twelfth - has come.
In olden days a feast, a revelry
to mark the end of holy Christmas tide.
Who even notes it now, despite the carol?
Tomorrow is epiphany, with gifts, 
perhaps, for children where tradtition holds.
The children of my house are grown and gone
away, and where I live only a few
will know which day the Magi are in town.
Therefore, no presents anymore for us.
How sad, you say, for gifts are good - moreso
when gold, incense and myrrh change hands.
Epiphany, from Greek, means to reveal.
Those camel-riding, good old kings came
in to find the love of God revealed.
What is in store for us who stay at home,
without a star, or caravan, or angel
voices in the night?  We have our lights, 
our baking, decorations, wine and songs,
and maybe church.  But are we ready to 
receive a revelation on a special
day - or even any day?  Suppose
the Big Reveal is not for us from God.
Suppose epiphany reveals to God
how well we see - or if we don't - this vision
that is meant for us to see.  When we
haul out the box to stow away the lights
and ornaments and such, will we give thought
to what the season has revealed of us?

Joe Carosella believes that Every Day Is a Beautiful Day. He hikes avidly, and loves nature, reading, ice cream, travel, and language(s). He writes, and spends time with family. His first book is Making Friends with God: A Year of Dialogues (Amazon KDP, 2024). Rabbit Tracks: The Poetry of Nature (Shanti Arts, 2025) is his second book. Joe’s poems have appeared in The Soliloquist, Amethyst Review, Adirondac, and Adirondack Almanack. He lives in Scotia, NY with his wife, Diury Alvarado.

A New Song
"Let the sea roar; and the
fullness thereof,
Let the field exult and all
that is therein...."
from Psalm 96

The cantor's chant surges.
A rush of elan fills
the hollow of my chest.
I begin to dance.
I am the depth and expanse
of the sea, the breadth of
the field as the wind rouses
the grass and becomes its songs.
And the song of the psalm
filters through my veins
strengthening the blessing 
of my heritage.

Janet Krauss, who has two books of poetry published, Borrowed Scenery, Yuganta Press, and Through the Trees of Autumn, Spartina Press, has recently retired from teaching English at Fairfield University. Her mission is to help and guide Bridgeport’s  young children through her teaching creative writing, leading book clubs and reading to and engaging a kindergarten class. As a poet, she co-directs the poetry program of the Black Rock Art Guild.

All Good Becoming

“…in a vision I beheld the fullness of God’s presence encompassing the whole of creation….And my soul in an excess of wonder cried out: ‘This world is pregnant with God!’” — Angela of Foligno

This could get weird
And kind of icky.
To think The Big One With The Beard
Is curled inside the rounded belly 
Of a woman sitting on a park bench. Is He She They
Yahweh
A mover, a roller, active and kicky,
Or slothful in the wholesome jelly? 

It is a mite less strange to conceive
The infinite thickens the spider
Lurking in the petals 
Of the dahlia, that fuchsia one. 
Or lodges in the buried acorn, future mother of leaves. 
To the perspiring workers on the roof installing solar panels, 
The Omnipotent Provider
Bursts forth as sunlight, the offspring of nuclear fusion.

God,
Here I am
Making light of the divine
(And for the damn
Purpose of a slant rhyme).
Should I attempt to manifest the cryptic 
Meaning of the mystic,
Or will my labors—profane at best, mundane at worst—prove flawed?

The astonishing vision 
That visited Angela—
Our small world overflowing with something like
Boundless dominion—
Was totally indescribable, an experience not unlike
Profound vertigo of the soul,
Whose insight exceeded her ability to parcel a
Neat explanation and render whole. 

If not what then how? 
Hers was the narrow:
To bow
Lower than worms and stones, 
To admit
Her savior, whose holy fire disjointed her bones
And enflamed his passion in their marrow,
And to suffer it

Gladly, the indeterminate sludge of doubt and grief,
Our worldly desolation. Hell,
Her radical devotion prompts our disbelief. 
Take her reverent care of lepers
And that time she drinks one’s putrid 
Wash-water and avers
Its taste wondrous, as pleasing as communion wine. Was all well 
With her mind? Or was she beyond lucid, 

Embodying a wild,
Ecstatic faith in the eternal
Coherence of love,
Whose depths, neither below nor above,
Flower in the flesh, 
Desiring to deliver each and every thing from conditional
Being to becoming: inviolate, fresh,
And reconciled?

S. D. Carpenter was born and raised on the Llano Estacado in Texas. She received a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Texas Tech University and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. She currently works as an assistant director at a research data archive for the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. Her writing has appeared in Pleiades.

Bilbo Mound, Savannah

"They thought it ludicrous that any mound or pottery
in Georgia would be many centuries older than those
in Ohio and Illinois.  The Bilbo Mound was over 3,000
years older than the oldest mound in Ohio!"
      --"The Bilbo Mound and Village Site (3,540 B.C.),"
           Richard L. Thornton, Apalache Research


East of the city, south of the river, west
of the sacred ocean, your patch of swampland
remains — your cypress and tupelo bottomland,
an ancient, somehow remaining piece in the
concrete/commercial and neighborhood-wattle
fabric-map of the urban city.

What prayers, what dances, with the words of
what language did your medicine healers call out,
waving turtle shell rattles, to bless and preserve
you for millennia, your damp bog soil still not
overrun by the tight-wound modern city?

Before Woodland, before Swift Creek, before
sand and grit-tempered pottery, in the planted
vegetable time of maygrass, knotweed, sunflower,
before grand earth-mound temples at Etowah,
Ocmulgee, Kolomoki, your people walked to you,
quiet foot falls to night rituals under the moon.

People of ebbtide, floodtide, crow moon, loon
moon, ebbtide, floodtide, people of deer, rabbit,
alligator, and fish, oyster, clam, and mussels,
who feasted under your trees at night, under
the foraging bats, left spearheads and bones here.

Still you remain in this small forest, bordered
by this new country's oldest golf course, plotted
out and played on by bored Scots in the 1700s.
Old concrete pipes pumped the city's run-off
to you in the 1800s, and today, your hand-dug
canoe canal going north to the river is very changed.

Place of seasonal ritual, place of ancestor spirits,
the new city has blessedly left you alone, but lined
your canal with concrete to drain the whole city
into a river of passing steel container ships, decks
high with metal boxes.  No one knows, really, what
'Bilbo Regional Storm Drainage Canal' is named for.

May we keep it that way forever, forever leave you
alone in your miraculous small woods with only
songbirds in trees, morning sunshine in the dewy
circles of spiders' webs in branches, cottonmouths,
fish in brackish cross channels, and your ancient ghosts.

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia where his yard is lush with vegetation. His latest chapbook is At Home with the Dreamlike Earth (The Poetry Box, 2023). His work has appeared in Willawaw Journal, San Pedro River Review, So It Goes, Soul-Lit, Poets Reading the News, As It Ought To Be, and other places, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

LA Metro Road Atlas
 
Descend the pigeons,
dip into the concrete river,
the hope for rain
that caught the Pineapple Express,*
one week gone.
 
Risen, feathers
silhouette white
against new snow on the mountains
far-off like paintings hung in the sky.
So, an auntie in the valley
keeps Christmas
snowflakes twinkling
above February begonias.
 
Tourists wave balloons
down the boulevard.
A man leads his friend with a cane
back to his coffee shop seat.
With worn-out clothes,
they've long since lost the way
to the usual on-ramp.
He tells his friend about palm trees outside
that dot the way to Disney,
so many
they are a forest line.
The palms punch
the hazy sky
all over the city…
 
of Angels,
outside the cathedral,
in candlelight, a family kneels on concrete.
Their baby's hair wisps like incense smoke,
they pray at the shrine
to Our Lady of Guadalupe.
She's at the plaza edge
to watch over the 101
and the freeway hum whispers holy,
the cars circle like rosary beads.
 
 
* During a Pineapple Express, an atmospheric river forms over Hawaii and carries heavy rain to the West Coast.
 

Sherry Weaver Smith searches for poems in graveyards, historical society museums, and on well-worn footpaths. Her poems have been published in the California Quarterly; The Heron’s Nest; The Seventh Quarry; the Origami Poems Project; Panorama, the Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature (Cities Edition); and the Arizona Literary Magazine. She has an M.Phil. from the University of Oxford and a B.A. from Duke University.

Night Flight

Two hours of the year to go
and one step from the back door into darkness.
Quiet except
                      for trial fireworks as the mountain
counts down. Time on a tightrope.
Across the wash a few windows
still awake and streetlamps on their toes
straining for a view into the future.
There’s an owl
                           perching in the yard
and when her moment comes
she flies at barely shoulder height,
dipping first then rising,
on the way
                   to where spirits meet
with a wingspan twelve months wide.

David Chorlton lived in Manchester and Vienna before moving to Arizona and beginning to learn from the desert and its creatures. He occasionally returns to his other long term pursuit of painting. The Bitter Oleander Press published his book Dreams the Stones Have in 2024.

We All Had Other Plans

“My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.” 
						Desmond Tutu


Nobody planned 
to be here tonight,
nobody, nobody, nobody,
yet the waiting room is full.

I rolled out of a nap
into a head on collision 
with the night stand,
lost that argument.

Patients on crutches, 
holding ice packs, 
some sitting in wheelchairs.
Faces grimace, masks torn off. 

Loved ones rub arms, 
hold hands, slump in chairs,
escape in phones. 
TV on, white noise.

Two walk in off the street,
they want a place to sleep.
Five more are announced 
by wailing siren, they get a room.

After a while, we start comparing notes, 
how long we have been waiting, 
for test or result, even the other plans 
we had for the evening; finally farewell.

Michael J. LaFrancis has been a trusted advisor to business, government, education and technology leaders and teams for over 20 years as they design, develop, implement and manage strategies to become more responsive to those they serve. He has worked for global technology leaders including Red Hat (IBM), Gartner and Digital Equipment. He has a B.A. in Psychology from Saint Leo (FL) University, is a graduate of the Organization and Systems Development Program at the Gestalt Institute in Cleveland.

The Dark Knows


I send my friend love and light in the coming year—
she replies loving the dark with an owl emoji. 
I too love the dark, like a letter tucked away 
to open in secret, the one I was waiting for, the one 
making all the difference. Night bleeds the body 
of day and its dailiness, chirrups full-throated 
to the wingbeat of owls. The other night, the one 
deep within, the two-faced Janus of passages, 
is no less a coin of opposites, no less a bodhisattva 
who knows what the dark knows and stories on 
anyway. I may steer toward light, but alligators 
are there, at my footboard, just as my father said 
to keep me in bed. All I can do is flip the coin, 
end to end, surrender anemone to its frail leaving, 
knowing winter glows blue in the moment 
of snowfall.    

Poet, playwright, essayist, and editor, Linda Parsons is the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. She is published in such journals as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Terrain, The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, and many others. Her sixth collection is Valediction: Poems and Prose. Five of her plays have been produced by Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville, Tennessee.