New Writing Engaging with the Sacred
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.
Image credit: Holy Trinity Cathedral, Down
see / through
(after the installation at Down Cathedral)
see
/
through
not there
but
cut out
the air
is
his
him
you
move
and he
moves
no – he is
the moving
s c r i p t u r e grows
but here it bleeds
through
polished stone
brass wound
look:
the body
gone
so what
do you see
through
the gone one
glass faces
your own
the ache of being
seen
no triumph
only
metal air light
and you
caught
inside
the cut
Poet’s Note: the cathedral was reordered a few years ago around the theme of pilgrimage. A brass cross was suspended over the altar. Revealed gradually as pilgrims enter, the cross’s impact lies largely in its emptiness: it is pierced by a cut-out silhouette of the crucified Christ. Pilgrims are invited to ‘see through’ Christ. The surrounding space becomes part of the work, so what is perceived through the crucified Christ depends on the viewer’s angle.
Christopher N. West (he/him) is a PhD candidate in Practical Theology at the University of Aberdeen. He is also an Irish Anglican priest.
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.
The Art of Silence
a Buddhist monk taught me to sit silently
be the moon floating over my back field
a buttercup cradled in a clump of spring grass
sit hushed
as the broad shoulders of granite mountains
in their shawl of clouds—
sit despite
an unquiet morning
that buzzes and twitters and zips
sit to be a dewdrop
in the garden
a perfect pearl of daybreak—
a Buddha
sitting.
Christine Andersen is a retired dyslexia specialist. She has published over 140 poems and is a 2025 Pushcart nominee. In 2025, she won the Jonathan Holden Poetry Chapbook Contest for To Maggie Wherever You’ve Gone, the Distinguished Favorite of the NYC Big Book Award for grief and remembrance. She lives on a Connecticut farm with five hounds.
Fleeting
We waited all winter for signs of life
skunk cabbage poking through the muck
the eastern phoebe's song
the red maple's crimson cloud.
The early garden morphs
from bare ground and fallen leaves
to rosy bleeding hearts and creeping phlox,
golden ragwort’s golden glow
and Jacob's ladders'
soft blues.
We wait so long for what is too soon over.
Ephemeral beauty beckons.
Gifted by what we cannot control,
is this not grace?
Ann Bodling is a gardener and spiritual director and writer who readily experiences God’s sacred presence in the land and its plants and creatures. She lives in the eastern United States with her husband, three goats, seven hens and the many wild ones who come to the two acres she is restoring for them.
Amethyst Review 