Amethyst Review

Wyoming Prayer

Evening settles gold
over the prairie.

Tall grasses
lean into the wind.

A blue heron lifts
from the riverbank,
following a line
only it can see.

As a teenager, I prayed
for the Holy Ghost
to set my tongue aflame,

listening
as others sang in languages
I couldn’t understand.

I wanted to belong.

Now I hear coyotes
calling through the dusk,
one voice,

then another answering.

I don’t know
what they’re saying.

Only that something
keeps calling,
and something
keeps answering.

Sam Aureli is an Italian-born poet living in the Boston area. A first-generation college graduate, he spent decades working with concrete, steel, and the built environment before turning to poetry as a way of exploring memory, inheritance, and the complicated legacies we carry. He is the author of On the Edge of Knowing (Kelsay Books, 2026). His chapbook, That’s Not My Shadow, won the 2026 Poetry Box Chapbook Prize and is forthcoming in 2027. His poems have appeared in The Berlin Review, Chestnut Review, The Bournemouth Journal, and other literary journals.

A Bodhisattva

She knew nothing of the Buddha
or of buddhahood, held no distinctions
sacred, thought no condition permanent,
no truths or laws transcendent, no glory 
but the glorious aftermath of chance 
and change, no consolation but the gift 
and precious grief of losing, no compassion 
to extend or be withheld, nothing certain 
but the unrelenting weight of ignorance, 
no presence but her sense that being here 
is always coming after, no thought 
but what arrives as joy, no voice 
but what wells up in laughter.

DB Jonas is the author of four collections of poetry: Tarantula Season and Other Poems (2023), Flight Risk, Poems and Translations (2025), In Dubious Terrain (2026) and Ut pictura (forthcoming in 2026). His work has appeared in over 70 journals internationally, examples of which can be accessed at jonaspoetry.com.

Elegy for Explorers
For Some Hospice Patients
  

Like Columba or Brendan
launched on the infinite sea searching
for their own spare, special place of Holy Ground
     
These holy ones cut themselves loose,
drift off when the TV is on, find the deep swell
the partner asleep on the couch.
		
Sweat on the forehead and wrist
arrives like spume off the bow as they journey
towards that ultimate harbor.

O Lord, O Eternal!
Listen as these holy ones praise You.
We lift them up, their spirits rising like incense.

Brian E. Backstrand is an Episcopal priest with pastoral experience in hospice, hospital and rural congregational settings. His work has appeared in South Dakota Review, The Long Story, Anglican Theological Review, and other literary journals. A collection of fiction came out in 2005: Little Bluestem: Stories from Rural America. He and his wife live on a farm in the Driftless region of Southern Wisconsin.

The Bodhi Tree

That man who squats at the base of my trunk
Above my invisible roots
A week he must have been here now
How and why did he choose me?

The chatter in the forest is ambiguous
Some think he is holy some say mad
Others say just compost for us trees
With a wilful purpose to die

For he has taken no nourishment
And my leaves tremble—I know not why
He makes my sap crawl and all the little creatures
Have crept from my bark to settle on him

I sense a great light in the dark
Even my rootlings pause their questing ways
Is this the famous extinction foretold?
Is this the stop of the world?

He rises finally and blesses me
Chewing one of my fruits
As he meanders down the hill
To tell the men

Clive Donovan has three poetry collections, The Taste of Glass [Cinnamon Press 2021], Wound Up With Love [Lapwing 2022] and Movement of People [Dempsey&Windle 2024] and is published in a wide variety of magazines including Acumen, Amethyst Review, Crannog, Pennine Platform, Popshot, Prole and Stand. He lives in Totnes, Devon, UK. He was a Pushcart and Forward Prize nominee for 2022’s best individual poems.

Pilgrimage

The river shanties share the water with 
the milk snake, the tree frog, the 
blue-spotted salamander.

The value of Solomon’s sparkling temple 
is questioned by Lincoln Scarlet in a
journal article that lightnings across the 
screen. In another, christening music and 
certain pulpit intonations are thundered. 
Scholar of the roiling molten core beneath 
mundane mysteries, he argues a crabgrass 
testament, a weedy faith in the whirlwind.

The palace is piped with credos prone to 
breakdowns, flooded throne rooms and new 
dunghills for the occasional Job. Listen: 
Call-and-response, call-and-response! 
Incense in the pews settling on summer 
dresses and denim shirts, pomade hair 
and the baby’s perfect fingernail.

The choir frog, the rough-legged buzzard, 
the chimney swift.

Born in Ithaca to a rope-necked maiden, he 
hurries Chicago streets with anarchic words 
somersaulting in his skull, like a circus child 
before the elephant. Can the garage rat 
metaphor the Divine? Music the Magnificat?

Lincoln is stunted, solo, noxious, feral, 
low, raw, rowdy and crude. He channels 
Luther on the pot, Teresa in ecstasy. He 
makes trouble like others bake wafers.

The long-tail weasel, the least weasel, 
the sad-sun weasel.

Alarms and mists are the meat of 
Lincoln’s day, steps beyond the line, 
steps beyond safe knowledge — a garish 
Wisdom walking the streets — a fraction 
of knowing inside the cloud, exalted 
undesign, wearing the weight of 
puzzlement and full-throated chaos 
while moving up the path.

Lincoln sits at the fast-food table with 
slavers, liars and flesh-sellers, with 
strutters and posers, with hard hearts 
and the empty-minded, and traces on 
the inside of his bones his own blight 
and meanness. They leave together and
start up the cipher road as if they know 
where their pilgrimage will take them.

The brown bat, the black bat, 
the eastern red bat.

Patrick T. Reardon, a Chicago Tribune reporter from 1976 to 2009, is the author of eight poetry collections. His latest is a chapbook from Bottlecap Press called New Chicago. His book Every Marred Thing: A Time in America was the winner of the 2024 Faulkner-Wisdom Prize. He is a six-time nominee in poetry for a Pushcart Prize. His poem “Mud” was one of the winners of the 2026 Lost Penny Press Broadside Competition. Reardon’s poetry has appeared in America, RHINO, Commonweal, Long Poem, Blue Unicorn, After Hours, Autumn Sky, Burningword Literary Journal and other journals. His website: patricktreardon.com

Artistry 


With strawberry blonde locks alight like flaming tongues,
she descends into her basement studio
to sit before her easel, its canvas
tabula rasa made taut upon its frame 
in preparation, expectation, to receive 
her delicate brushstrokes intentionally touched.

Her eyes scan over tiny pots of paint
like books arrayed on a library shelf –
lapis lazuli, lingonberry, brick, clay
her Dickinson, Derrida, Plato, Paul,
some of these vessels well used, near empty,
while others brim full for when they are called –

and she starts to mix upon her palette 
different pigments to craft the right shade,
ivory added to brighten up jade
while equal parts umber and thyme combine
to form a warm glow: the hues kept on hand 
blended to create the colors required.

So she trains her sight, focused and alert,
to reflect her subject’s shadows and lines
with an outlined sketch, her keen imagination
composing the scene, fleshing out symbols,
drawing on tradition to layer on meaning 
to bring into being her vision of beauty,

and as I sit in my upstairs study,
seeking to understand the faith I sense, 
my pen in hand, a journal open to advent,
I start to notice how my thoughts arrange 
events from my life, blending book-bound beliefs 
to illumine who I am on the page:

the realities stored within our souls
flowing through this process like ink moving through pens,
paint rushing through brushes, words resting in prayers;
each of us contributing our pigments
to the portrait revealed slowly by Time –
we shaped for this image, created to create.

Nathaniel A. Schmidt is an ordained minister in the Reformed Church in America who serves as a hospice chaplain. He holds degrees from Calvin Theological Seminary, Calvin University, and the University of Illinois Springfield. His newest collection of poems, Transfiguring, is available from Wipf & Stock, as is his first collection, An Evensong. He lives with his librarian wife, Lydia, and their two children in southwest Michigan, meaning life is a perpetual story time.

Sayonara

Pink butterflies may exist, but they are extremely rare…and should be cherished if encountered.  Outlife Expert

“I loved that movie. It was so romantic,” my mother started to talk about an old black and white film I think I remember seeing but can’t recall its name either. It’s where a woman waits on a hilltop waiting for her lover. While she stands there, we know, although she doesn’t, that he has been killed in a distant military operation. 

“They promised each other they would meet there. It was their special place.” My mother’s eyes are welling up at this point. “Then she’s surrounded by these butterflies,” she continues, her voice breaking, “they just appear out of nowhere, fluttering around her. It’s so beautiful.” 

I swear, if she starts full on bawling, I’m outta here. I mean, I can only take so much romance. I make a joke and change the subject. 

My mom has been a voracious reader of romance novels for several years now. She left shopping bags of those books to me after she died that she picked up at thrift stores. They all seem to have absorbed the mood of those places—musty, old and lonely. I guess they were her legacy. I really find romance novels boring. I know there’s a formula to them and as a writer myself I realize the genre is not as easy as it appears. They’re all pretty predictable, ending on a high note; yet the paths are so circuitous it allows a sense of individuality to each story. Maybe I will take a few of those books to read, I thought. Couldn’t hurt.

I was not surprised when my parents began sleeping in separate bedrooms. I knew it was mainly because my mom spent long nights with her light on reading those books. She was a very affectionate woman and I believed those books soothed her and perhaps gave her a more attentive husband, even if he was fictitious.  

She’d tell me that she believed, as many cultures do, that butterflies symbolize transformation and resurrection of a soul. “When I die,” she would proclaim, “I’ll come back as a butterfly and let you know I made it to the other side.” 

This was perhaps the beginning of her descent into dementia, although I didn’t recognize it. I just thought she was being poetic. My Italian mother was always a believer in the spiritual realm, influenced by the church and by her grandmother who was considered the neighborhood healer during the Great Depression and had visions beyond the scope of reason. Neither of us thought that was an oddity, unlike my dad who thought we were both a bit bat crazy. 

I remember mom telling me how she witnessed her grandmother having a seizure and when she came out of it, she told my mother what she saw. She claimed she witnessed her brother, who was in the military in Italy, thrashing around in the ocean. She cried, worrying he was drowning. Days later she received a telegram saying his military ship had been torpedoed, but he survived! 

Mom was a young 80 when her dementia became too overwhelming for my dad to handle by himself and was brought to live in a nearby nursing home. She actually seemed happier to be surrounded by more people, conversation and the owner’s pet dog. They also offered more activities and outings than my father was able to undertake. Unfortunately, by then my mother was not mobile or able to talk.  A shower accident contributed horribly to her death a year later. 

After she died, my husband’s job ended which had brought us to California where my parents lived, and we returned to our home in Tucson, Arizona. We resumed our normal life, which included taking care of our garden of saguaros, mesquite bushes and oleanders.

That summer, while I was piddling around in the house, my husband came inside and insisted I go outside with him into the yard. “Outside” was not my favorite place to be in summer when the temperatures are in a feverish pitch but he was anxious to show me something, so I followed him. 

He brought me to the oleander bush filled with pink blossoms and just stood there without saying a word. I commented on how pretty the flowers were, wondering why he was so fascinated by the oleander until I saw the blossoms move, then flutter. Realization came slowly. By every flower was a pink butterfly. The entire oleander was filled with pink butterflies—a plant that is extremely toxic to them as well as humans! But apparently, not to my mother.  

My reaction was typical for me. I shut down; went back inside the house and continued with minor, unimportant chores before my eyes welled up and I started full on bawling.

Originally from Chicago, Marlene DeVere has traveled and lived in various parts of the country and in the Middle East, but she admits it has been the inner journey—explored through writing—that has been the most rewarding. Retired from a career in teaching, broadcast journalism and copywriting, she lives in Tucson, Arizona. Her work has been included in Root Smoke, FemiNICHE, Angels on Earth, Lowestoft Chronicle, and The Bad Day Book Anthology among others, including being a Finalist in the Bellingham Review’s Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction.

Te Deum

quietly
within the blossoming day we are
whispering te deum

reading spare scripture
at noon in the sunshine

we are observing entire views in viewfinders
in soft light on a high cloudy day
patterns of te deum

back from visiting those corners of prayer
noticing what changes quickly
backward steps, stuttering blunders
we chant te deum

after small animal hibernation
the lonesome hedgehog, the secretive snail
after praising seraphim and cherubin
and folks holding steady
we sing te deum

that same song for simplicity and repetition
anaphora of stones and singing cedar trees
the female oriole
collecting gossamer strands of horsehair from farms
we grow along with that bird 
while chanting:
te deum, te deum

Liz Nakazawa is the editor of Deer Drink the Moon:Poems of Oregon. This is an anthology of 33 Oregon poets writing nature poems. Her own poetry has appeared in Willawa, Timberline Review, Amethyst, ahundredgourds and other publications.

The Last Half of the Year


Fall
The votive candle spins its last
smoke into the soft tides of air.
The moon slips
away from the earth.
Rain loses its grip
on red stained glass.

Winter

My prayers have gone loose
like wind sound that searches in a dense forest,

and the story I thought I was telling
stops short
at the windbreak.

Where do I walk now when the snow
fills the old footpaths to the rangeland,
and I don’t remember the names 
of the mountains anymore?

Sherry Weaver Smith writes poems inspired by her Catholic faith and the landscapes of the American West. Poems have received a Pushcart Prize nomination and a semifinalist award in the Narrative Poetry Contest (Naugatuck River Review). She is the author of The Wolf and the Shield: An Adventure with Saint Patrick. Her poems have been published in The Heron’s Nest, The Seventh Quarry, Vancouver Cherry Blossom Haiku Invitational, Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place and Nature; and Amethyst Review.