Amethyst Review

Desert Lesson

Follow the wadi down and you will see 
beneath the boulders tenuous hints of green.
Desert is not bereft of company.
Spirits are everywhere and sometimes seen.
Hearken to hermits, who knew early on
the power of barrenness to stir the soul.
They found a starker landscape, daily drawn
into the emptiness that holds the whole, 
seeking the union words strain to reveal, 
walking the path that fuses here and there,   
touching the stillness time tends to conceal, 
entering silence as the utmost prayer. 
Thus did their desert finally come to bloom.
Thus did they learn what we now but presume.

Andrew Lustig is the Holmes Rolston III Chair in Religion and Science emeritus at Davidson College. Earlier appointments included professorships at Rice University and the Texas Medical Center, along with experience in the trenches of New York politics as staff ethicist for Governor Mario Cuomo’s Task Force on Life and the Law. As a recovering academic, he now finds solace in sharing a backlog of works without footnotes, including poetry and original music.

Soul-Letting

In the dark before dawn in the dripping ink of an autumn morning I ache and bleed these words trailing the star-born night echoing silently in my heart and every heart and what is this holy scratching, this sacred not-knowing leaning into mystery and how personal it all is even the cold air a few degrees away from frost and who knows what to make of the rain tapping gently on the windows streaking down as if to prefigure a wound or the shape of a woman bowing in prayer and I am the woman, I am the man, человек, a person of all of us united in cosmic freedom and suffering and I feel the rain as my sister, my brother in wonder and a single lit candle before the icon of Christ one of the most profound events ever happening now in the dark as I sneeze my head off with leaf stains on the sidewalks everywhere around this small holy burg in Nowheresville, America and the ancient root rot of the earth slowly turning into blessing and thanksgiving in tiny shrouds of Turin the world over and Lord, thou knowest—and what rife discordants come together somehow in unlikely matrimony like Meister Ekhart wrote in  “When I Was The Forest”—and I am the forest as all debris come together even the broken bottle neck of a pint of Thunderbird thrown into a roadside ditch and I want to hold your hand as I did in Ames, Iowa circa the late eighties at a Rolling Stones concert with a girl whose name I did not know and would never see again though somehow this must be held in eternity as a tiny beacon of light shining forever for the innocence and joy of this brief holding that happened spontaneously and in deep accord with the Holy Spirit who is no keeper of time or space but all of it everywhere always here now at once in the midst of global warming and mayhem and the seething snakehood of viral lies spiraling out in digital madness, and though I walk through the shadows of a blinding Wal*Mart I shall fear no evil except for the evil emanating from my own middle-aged heart that for once (for once) craves healing and annulment of all of its desires except for the yearning to be simple and kind like an old lady who has nothing to give but a few nickels and laughs easily as in a Rumi poem and the widow’s mite made manifest in coins from the fish truck and then what is the world and what is the joy, what is this constant and unfolding banquet happening in the midst of record-breaking hurricanes and school shootings whose smoking shells fall to the linoleum floor of a first-grade classroom as one of my very own students emailed me saying she was taking the day off on the anniversary of her own school shooting she survived huddled and terrified under a desk a few years ago and how do you respond to this, what can you do or say—and what is a page, my love, what is a blinking cursor, how so much loveliness and beauty in the midst of so much suffering and we must be heirs to a sigh, to a whisper and a whimper and a moan and Aw, shucks delight and how easily I missed the two-foot put and the lay-up after a break away and how my cornhole bag slid right off the slanted board—but somehow everything comes back again, everything is meant and redeemed for holiness, I sweareth, and how manifest of glory and kingdom come I need not understand a single thing but wonder, wonder, and thanksgiving this early day in dark November to lean into this love and to cleave to it even unto death, I am ready, Lord, I am almost ready and given to trembling all over as befits your crude pot-hole creature, your faithful and clueless mut, a mercy upon a mercy upon a mercy and then an unraveling ball of yarn rolling where I can, where I must, reaching out to you once and for all and for always, my open hands now a pair of rising doves turning into flight headlong for the one true and only light opening above and inside us and bursting out into uncontainable awe.

Note: человек (Cello-vek) means person in Russian.

Robert Vivian‘s last book under his own name was All I Feel Is Rivers, though he did publish a novel last year under a pseudonym.

Napping Beside the Fountain

I want my edges to dissolve
inside the streaming arcs,
let me be drenched in some dreaming element
as fluency becomes me.

Andrea Potos is the author of several poetry collections, most recently The Presence of One Word, and Her Joy Becomes, both from Fernwood Press. You can find her at andreapotos.com

Chicago Morning 
  
I write poems to be clear how  
leaf fall could call down the sky. 
 
He is confused with a lowly 
gardener and disappeared.
  
Fill the skies. Your helicopters  
cannot snuff all the candles. 
  
prayers 
at his street memorial
  
the votive 
shaking inside 

After making his rounds as a United Methodist clergyperson in Wisconsin for over thirty years, Dan Schwerin is now serving as the bishop assigned to the Northern Illinois-Wisconsin Area of The United Methodist Church.

Farmhand Sabbath
Something greater than the temple is here.
	— Matt. 12:6

When eaten, bread transmutes to body: Good.
When broken, earth communes with sprouting grain.
Light resurrects shared seed so nature’s food
Might translate law transcending worldly gain:
Creation never rests. The worker’s toil
Should own the rich priest’s consecrated bread.
Eat freely on this Sabbath, lest it spoil.
Please, break law’s fast, like David, when he fed
A hunger greater than his temple’s host.
Each blesséd day, like Robin Hood we’ll break
Our bread, seeds’ miracle, this holy ghost.
Our sweat yields grain to bake a savior’s cake
That feeds the multitude. For all we raise,
This manna, we give sacrifice of praise.

Beth Houston has taught writing at ten universities and colleges in California and Florida. She has published a couple hundred poems in dozens of literary journals. She edits the Extreme formal poetry anthologies (Rhizome Press). www.bethhouston.com

What I am doing when I am baking apples

Mining for dirt, extracting the core
of bitter pips, lurking cyanide,
knife-tip circling the maggot’s cave. 
Immersed in this quiet world of browning flesh,
hard and imperfect, sour and bruised. 

Like me, like me, like the heart of me. 

No sugar. Deglet Nour dates, 
the expense irrelevant, the one cost worth it. 
The apples were waiting, tucked in damp grass.                     
Turning the rotten cheeks back to the soil.
Fallen in autumn turns sin inside out, is where goodness lies. 

The spices are coming into season.
Ginger, cardamom, cloves, my year-round cinnamon.
Spices bring dreams, are medicine and flight,
revelations print-labelled to make you forget.
Every time you grate nutmeg, the trance state beckons.             

Butter has softened by itself;
like a mother, like all women,
craving time alone in a temperate space.
Moulding around the dates’ jammy fibres, 
folding into their fragmented curves, dusted with fragrance. 
A yielding mess of glossy promise. 

Like me, like me, like the heart of me. 

Take your favourite wooden spoon, its handle smooth, 
its curved lip skilled and experienced. 
Tongue the sweetness into that space you carved. 
Replace the worm’s theft, make it better than new. 

And then the fire to finish them, 
to burnish each globe to a shine.

Liz Kendall is a poet and non-fiction writer based in Surrey. She co-authored the award-winning book Meet Us and Eat Us: Food plants from around the world, a celebration of biodiversity in poetry, prose, and fine art photography. Liz’s writing ranges from ecopoetry to devotional poems for Anubis, mythological creatures, and rock bands. Her work has appeared in Mslexia, Clarion, Consilience, and Amethyst Review, and in anthologies from Candlestick Press, The Hedgehog Poetry Press, Rough Diamond and The Winged Moon. Her website is theedgeofthewoods.uk. 

Liz also gives Shiatsu and massage and teaches Tai Chi Qigong.

Honey

BEE, I’m really thinking of you
Here in this deepest winter place
Putting your sweetness in my tea.
Hmmmmmmm, I sing along with
Your wings as I slowly stir
Summer into the dark water in my mug.
Round and round, humming, sighing
Swaying in the meadows of my mind
A flower in the warm wind, waiting for
You to make love to me and
Fly away carrying a little of my sweetest
Essence, so you can turn it into food
For God and bears!

And then I sit in my chair and stare
Out at the snow, and take in all of this
In slow, savoring sips.  Warmth spreads
And deeper knowledge sinks 
Into my gut.  I feel your buzz down
Inside me, and smile, thinking how
Lovely to drink a dream of spring.
It makes winter richer, more real.  

Laura Vines is from Birmingham, Alabama but spent 11 years in Alaska, which affected her music, her poetry, and her writings tremendously. She is a teacher, performer, singer-songwriter, arranger, and multi-instrumentalist.

Patrick Trombly wrote and published poetry at the College of the Holy Cross in 1989-1990, and upon graduation in 1991, he took a 35-year hiatus before picking the genre back up again in 2025. His poems have been published or accepted for publication in a number of journals, including Loch Raven Review, Beyond Words, the Dewdrop, Hemlock Journal and multiple Wingless Dreamer anthologies. His writing explores the relationships among humans, nature, God/the afterlife, and time. His poems are visual, use approachable language, and use various forms and literary devices such as personification, metaphor, and symbolism.

Child, You Are a Story

Chanting melodies of holy water. 
Each burbled gush a song bird
trickling your boy-throat.
Look up.
Blue-cheeked bee eaters 
and willow warblers 
drip sugar psalms. 
White-winged snow finches 
and meadow pipits 
fly bliss-stung with your voice. 
Ivory-throated dippers, song thrushes 
and violet loons pray to you.
And always
the smallest of warblers, 
the Italian sparrows,
trill of the sea.
Child, fear not the night. 
Call not for home. 
Listen in the dark. 
God hums and saints chirp. 
Follow their truth. 
All sound sings perfume. 
Forest flowers rained on by angels 
color-wash your lips.
Buttercups and cowslip, 
bluebells and bellflowers 
silk your tongue.
Purple angelica 
and Tuscan blue rosemary
stain your voice. 
Croon it all. 
Nodding lilies and honey garlic, 
snowball bush and Florentine iris.
Bring them to your body,
roll in them,
and with the birds
suck their nectar.

Suzanne Scarfone is a poet from Michigan. Influenced by English Romanticism and French Surrealism, her writing paints the visionary musical moments found in the smallest details of everyday life. Her work has appeared in such journals as New Feathers Anthology, Cider Press Review, Phoebe, Coe Review, Frigg, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Cirque: A Literary Journal for the North Pacific Rim, and in the anthology To Light a Fire: 20 Years with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project . She has also co-authored Lessons from Afghanistan: A Curriculum for Exploring Themes of Love and Forgiveness.