Amethyst Review

The Road



Life is nothing but a road--

a farmer’s dirt path

through the winter wheat

where he can drive a tractor



or walk cows home to

the barn’s warmth or

stroll to a distant church spire

piercing clouds gathered above trees.



The footpath leads down to a river

where children in summer catch frogs

and release them in the tall grass.

Bluegills in the river wait for flies.



The dirt trail, a byway open to all,

made by unknown explorers,  

stamped with boot tracks of autumn deer hunters

looking for a place of rest, an open fire.



As you walk by abandoned railroad tracks,

the sun breaks through clouds.

Crows call to each other in the pines,

speaking about where to find food,



their past lives, and the ghosts of friends.

You overhear two people talking,

a gentle discussion about the rain and wind.

An old wooden bridge crosses the river.



Carrying a bag of rusty gardening tools,

your hands and feet are tired at day’s end.

You yearn for a pint of ale, the hearth, 

a bowl of cabbage and corned beef stew.



You feel a hand reaching to touch your hand.

We crave knowing who awaits in the next village,

over the next hill, who lives down the road

in the faded white clapboard farmhouse.



What happened to old friendships

that you savored at night like spiced wine?

The quiet of the forest, 

spring snow turning into rain--

the thought of heaven.

Jonathan Thorndike is an amateur Irish fiddle player, grandfather, lover of dogs, bicycle mechanic, and English professor in Nashville, Tennessee. His poetry previously appeared in Albany Review, Bellingham Review, Panoply, Piedmont Literary Review, Red Cedar Review, Slipstream, South Florida Poetry Review, Sunrust, The Windless Orchard, and Zone 3.

Above the Dome

Walking home at noon
dark clouds unload,

the vale of tears creating pools
to be stepped around with care.

I push the silver button to launch
a spring-loaded shelter,

black dome blooming overhead 
full circle, like the night sky.

Above the black,
in outer space,

the seagulls loft and wheel
invisible but heard,

screeing to each other—
the joy of unfettered flight.

William Ross is a Canadian writer and visual artist living in Toronto. His poems have appeared in Rattle, The New Quarterly, Humana Obscura, New Note Poetry, Cathexis Northwest Press, Topical Poetry, Heavy Feather Review,*82 Review, and Alluvium. Recent work is forthcoming in Bindweed Magazine and Anti-Heroin Chic.

An Encounter with Gentleness

It was a small thing,
the minutest gesture.
I doubt today if you even remember.

A spider, sitting on your shoulder,
and yet, no anger or disgust.
No startled swatting or violent brush.

Just mild amusement
and a little card.
A quick relocation,

then return to conversation.

Liv Ross is an urban monk, a poet, a painter, a birder, and a student of Christian Spirituality. She has been engaged in creative writing more or less consistently for two decades and was slightly startled, though far from displeased, to discover that poetry is her medium. When she’s not writing, Liv practices gardening, pipe-smoking, leather-working, and mischief. She lives in the Midwest with a dog, Jedi, and two cats, Gandalf and Patroclus. Peeks into her work can be found on Instagram @liv_ross_poetry or twitter @je_suis_liv.

Notes from the Cistern

February 588 BC
Jerusalem, Quarters of the Guard
The Cistern of Malachiah; nearby, an almond tree.
The prophet, Jeremiah, is besieged by those who would silence him.
 
 
I know the hemisphere of my thoughts…
but not of Yours.
 
Words, sentences are scumbled. 
Mired.  Captive.
 
I am target: labelled, persecuted, mocked;
only the watching-tree saw my struggle,
my resistance, my unwilling descent
into the cistern, finding only soft, pitiless mud
at the bottom.
 
The stillness overwhelms intention,
and I, messenger, have no voice for words,
even those engraved with an iron stylus.
 
In this loathsome borderland between earth
and hell,
I am bound in the blind length of dread.
 
Light from the bottle-shaped mouth above,
lights only slightly.
Dolomitic limestone and chert walls,
covered with broken plaster of lime paste,
surround me,
and I have been entrapped by the
broken cisterns I deride.
 
The stone cover replaced overhead is shroud;
all is ashen.
I am devoured by the darkness, abandoned.
A cricket begins to prophecy.
 
And am I to think God humorous
when He teases me with my own analogy? 
Present reality forbids.
 
He makes a crucible out of my description,
my enslavement to truth.
Yet He has heard.  Approved.
 
More often mine is the voice disapproved. 
Jerusalem will fall as chastisement by
sword and famine, its cedars cut and
cast into the fire; its treasures will be in ruins,
dispersed;
its inhabitants will consume the flesh of
one another. 
 
Ebedmelech, the Ethiopian, is here with
servants to lift me up into the sun-washed day. 
He advises the worn and faded rags thrown down
be placed to prevent the ropes from burning.
 
And I am raised slowly as a pail of water,
once again to serve the thirst.
And still I am prisoner and Prisoner.
 
Ah yes.  The almond blossoms.
 

Ann Power is a retired faculty member from The University of Alabama.  She enjoys writing historical sketches as well as poems based in the kingdoms of magical realism. Her work has appeared in: Spillway, Gargoyle Magazine, The Birmingham Poetry Review, Dappled Things, The Copperfield Review, The Ekphrastic Review, The Loch Raven Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, Amethyst Review, and other publications.  She was nominated for Best of the Net in Poetry for her poem, “Ice Palace.” 

Be Bumped

A bee hit my thumb as I walked
and bumped me off my stride.
No sting but a side step, taken aback,
forgetful for a moment 
that a beloved was busy dying. 

A bee and today’s complicated sky
pushed me alive and disappearing 
under a mound of clouds that shoved me
into a hopscotch of years.
With memories, I catch my longest breath.

My phone rings and swift as a bee
my hearing falls to the ground
where it stays while I ponder the length
of a life. How long it took the bee 
to bump my thumb and what it did after.
It did not die.

Will tomorrow knock me
onto another new path,
or is death forever rolling in, sweeping wide,
and taking someone far out, only to draw
another in. To bump us into listening
for the drone that threads it all together.

Humbled, I browse
as the bee buzzes the petals 
of my uncle’s life, a furry pellet 
diving into each headfirst 
to carry the gold we all carry home.

Rachel Dacus is the author of five novels. Her poetry collections are Arabesque, Gods of Water and Air, Femme au Chapeau, and Earth Lessons. Rachel’s work has appeared widely in print and online, in Boulevard, Gargoyle, Prairie Schooner, and others, as well as the anthology Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California. She lives in the San Francisco area. Connect with her at www.racheldacus.net.

To Martin Buber

In the beginning is the relation, 
and I and thou are one;
then I calls out to I, 
and suddenly becomes
a consciousness of experience, 
that feels and orders world;
but ich-und-es is of the past, 
where nothing can unfurl. 
Though when the evening’s amethyst 
fixes me in place, 
and her quickening opal eyes 
look me in the face,  
the ich-und-es is taciturn;  
the I emerges free;
then I can greet the present You,
and we can truly be. 

Carter Davis Johnson is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Kentucky. In addition to his scholarly work, he writes creatively and has been published in Ekstasis, Road Not Taken, Flyover Country, and Front Porch Republic. He also writes a weekly Substack publication, Dwelling: Embracing the non-identical in life and art.

An Expanding Swirl of Light

	—after Jean Sibelius’ Violin Concerto in D Minor, Opus 47



You tell me
that you have gone deep
with the music,
eyes closed,
tears streaming down your cheeks,
after the standing ovation.

Sibelius, the failed violinist,
who wrote a virtuoso violin concerto, in 1902,
for someone other than himself to perform,
in the guise of Baiba Skride,
a Neaman Stradivarius
alternately weeping and singing in her hands,

more than a century later,
her bow moving over the strings
as if she were spinning a silken
music in the air,
as if she found the seam
into which you could slip into

the transcendent, with ease, rinsing you
and rinsing you again
with the heavy fragrance
of honey locust flowers
scenting each gust
of the cooling morning breeze

blowing through the Koussevitsky 
Music Shed, the violinist pausing only for
the orchestral accompaniment,
head held high, poised, 
ready to finish the weaving
of some of Sibelius’s finest

pages of  semiquavers, filling
the space within you
with an expansive swirl of  light,
one that reconnects you to the miraculous,
that may not be able to
restore your memory, but

creates a tacit new one that shines
beyond any shadow of forgetting,
that remains vibrant with
the sweetened tones of your remembering,
the music transforming
itself as the emergence of your healing angel

just hovering there 
over you beside me like an answered prayer.

Wally Swist’s books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2011 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition, and A Bird Who Seems to Know Me: Poems Regarding Birds and Nature, winner of the 2018 Ex Ophidia Poetry Prize. Recent essays, poems, and translations have appeared in Asymptote (Taiwan), Chicago Quarterly Review, Commonweal, The Comstock Review, New World Writing, Pensive: A Journal of Global Spirituality & the Arts, Today’s American Catholic, and Poetry London. Shanti Arts published his translation of L’Allegria, Giuseppe Ungaretti’s first iconic book, in August 2023.

Ice Cream and Talmud


If only I could get you to eat this ice cream!
Sometimes simple tasks are hardest, and I’ve lived through that.

And the heart does have its reasons. The Talmud
says we are each a planet: “Save one life,
save the whole world.” Now to my mind, this is accurate
based on everything I’ve come to know of people,
which is all anyone can go on in the end.

To get back to the ice cream. I’ve been trying to reconcile
you and this ice cream, and it hasn’t happened.
I’ve laid out for you
the ways this world would be a better place,
if only you would follow my advice
and eat. Because I grieve to see you
not happy. And just now it dawns on me –

perhaps a little late – that my desire
to see you happy may not be what you
most want. Perhaps you want something quite different.
Perhaps you don’t know what you want. Your heart
says no to ice cream, and you just trust that.

John Claiborne Isbell was born in Seattle, USA and later lived in Europe and the United Kingdom, where he went to school. He has been teaching languages for some time, teaching French and German at universities in the United Kingdom and the United States. He has published various books, including a volume of poetry, Allegro, with a picture of a cello on the cover. Two more books came out this year, both about women authors.

Doubts creep in like a vine

Doubts creep in like a vine
crawling up a wall, and I wonder:

Are You there, God? Up there—in heaven?
Above the clouds? Beyond the blue sky?
Where I can’t see?

Or are You hiding somewhere else—
behind that tree or inside that flower
where a butterfly is whispering
its secret prayer to You?

Maybe You are the voice I hear
when I write these words.
Maybe You are the air I breathe,
the golden light of dawn, the songs 
that birds sing?

Maybe these doubts are just an illusion
You create to see if we are seeking You 
sincerely, to see if we will persist in our 
search or just give up.

Or maybe the doubts are Your way of
asking a question, a way of drawing us
closer to You?

Bruce Black is editorial director of The Jewish Writing Project. His poetry and personal essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Write-Haus, Soul-Lit, The BeZine, Bearings, Super Poetry Highway, Poetica, Lehrhaus, Atherton Review, Elephant Journal, Tiferet, Hevria, Jewthink, The Jewish Literary Journal, The Reform Jewish Quarterly, Mindbodygreen,  and Chicken Soup for the Soul. He lives in Highland Park, IL. 

Sway


And then there was the time I'd had a couple of drinks at home
and went out wandering in the woods near my hous
in a light snowfall and found an illegal deer stand high up in a tree
and being seized with a sudden sense of outrage
I ran home and got a sledgehammer from my she
and went back and climbed up the tree despite my fear of heights
and standing in the crotch of the tree
and trying not to look down I pounded away at the wooden planks,
at first ineffectually but with escalating frustration and stupid fury 
until they finally succumbed and one by one broke loose and fell
away from the tree. At one point in my frenzied onslaught 
I had to stop and rest for some moments,
looking out breathing hard sweating and swaying 
over the forest floor and its carpet of leave
and I felt the whole world stop for a moment
as I waited to find my balance again
and I thought I could die doing this
and what a stupid way to die that would be
but I didn't really care and I resumed whacking away
with the sledge until all the parts of the deer stand 
had been knocked down and then I climbed down shakily
and dragged all the wooden planks home and sometime later I burne
them in my wood stove and they gave off sparks
as they burned. And there was nothing more of it
except that afterward I would sometimes wonder why
I had done it and whether others I met had ever stood,
leaning out into space, in the thrall of some strange passion,
and swaying. 

E. J. Evans is the author of Ghost Houses (Clare Songbirds), Conversations with the Horizon (Box Turtle Press), and the chapbook First Snow Coming (Kattywompus Press). He has poetry forthcoming in Innisfree Poetry Journal, I-70 Review, and Worcester Review. He has lived in California and in Florida and currently lives in central New York.