Amethyst Review

Restoration

I don’t remember when it broke or how—
the statue of the Infant of Prague my mother 
gave me more than forty years ago. 
But I remember gathering up the pieces,
frantically reaching under the bed and nightstand
heedless of the sharp edges, 
slipping the shards into a white cotton sock
to keep them from getting separated,
swaddling them between two thick sweaters
in the bottom drawer to prevent further fracture.

I kept it in that drawer for decades, 
until the day I watched you repair  
the porcelain frame that held our wedding picture
with such tender care, and measured pace,
your patience as you held each fragment 
in place until the bond was permanent.
When I asked you to restore my mother’s gift,
you withdrew the fragments like an archeologist 
unearthing an ancient treasure with nothing 
but tweezers and glue and steady hands.

Now I keep it on a high shelf safe from traffic,
where no one can see the delicate web of cracks,
or the hole in the back where the tiny bits
had shattered into such fine powder 
they couldn’t be repaired, but you gathered them 
like gold dust and poured them into the cavity,
restored, repaired, remembered. 

Gloria Heffernan is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Fused (Shanti Arts Publishing). Her craft book, Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. She received the 2022 Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Prize. Gloria is the author of the collections Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica (Kelsay Books), and What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List, (New York Quarterly Books). Her forthcoming collection, Moments of Color and Cloud will be published by Shanti Arts in 2026. To learn more, visit: www.gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.

image: © Jorge Royan / http://www.royan.com.ar

The Definition of Joy
After a painting by Monique Belitz

Joy is a surprise in a wounded world.
Joy is a purple aster, buzzing with bees.
Joy is a parliament of magpies.
Joy is an apple tree, laden with fruit.

Joy is the exuberance of sunflowers.
Joy is the pink gate to the courtyard.
Joy is the companionship of dogs.
Joy is the squash, heavy on the trellis.

Joy is resting under a tree in silence.
Joy is kneeling, lifting, carrying. 
Joy is raising your arms towards the sky.
Joy is pushing the wheelbarrow heaped with harvest.

Joy is the laughter of women working side by side.
Joy is the well-trodden path from your house to mine.
Joy is the evening light on the mountain.
Joy is the whisper of grace.
 

Agnes Vojta grew up in Germany and now lives in Rolla, Missouri where she teaches physics at Missouri S&T and hikes the Ozarks. She is the author of Porous Land, The Eden of Perhaps, and A Coracle for Dreams (Spartan Press), and her fourth collection Love Song to Gravity has come out from Stubborn Mule Press in 2025. Agnes is associate editor of Thimble Literary Magazine and host of the Poetry at the Pub reading series in Rolla. Her poems have appeared in a variety of magazines; you can read some of them on her website agnesvojta.com

Deer In Early April


We saw five deer in late afternoon, two newly born
wander out of deep pine woods into the meadow.
They walked on crumbled ice edging the brook 
soundless in the soft April snow. 

I moved here from a city with the rumble of traffic 
and triple deckers leaking sound on warm nights.
Our homes almost hugged each other, they were that close.
In winter we grabed sleds and raced each other down the street.

Here my closest neighbors are deer and owl, hare and fox.
Early spring is quiet, except the first quacks of wood frogs.
We wait for the spring peepers and bullfrogs to join the song.
Returning light stirs us all.

I watch the deer melt into the meadow.
They stop and the fawn jumps—
back legs flung high
with great exultation.

Elaine Reardon is a poet, herbalist, and painter who lives surrounded by forest. Her first two chapbooks, The Heart is a Nursery For Hope, 2016, and Look Behind You, were published by Flutter Press. Stories Told In A Forgotten Tongue, an immigrant story, was recently published by Finishing Line Press. www.elainereardon.wordpress.com.

Holy Saturday

When I learn Lady Julian
said all shall be well

upon waking from near death
in the middle of the Black Plague,

I can begin to believe it.
Well the way a seed is well 

when it dies and is buried,
and that’s all you can imagine. 

Well like night. Winter. 
Thunder. Wind.

Well like I thought I could not live 
without you,

and look at me now.
Am I living?

Jenna Wysong Filbrun is the author of the poetry collection, Running Toward Water, forthcoming from Shanti Arts in 2026. Her poems have appeared in Blue Heron Review, Deep Wild Journal, ONE ART, and other publications. She practices poetry to deepen her awareness of connection and loves to spend time at home and in the wild with her husband, Mike, and their dogs, Oliver and Lewis. Find her on Substack @jennawysongfilbrun or on Instagram @jwfilbrun.

This night

“Worthy alone to know the 
time and hour” — Exsultet, Easter Vigil


Just and right, ardent. Debt paid, blood washed.

This feast, this night — from enslavement. 

Behind, in front of the fire pillar, past the salt pillar, 
Samson’s pillars, the pillars of the Temple, veil torn,
dry land across the sea until the water walls fall, 
legs broken on both crosses.

This happy night of Wisdom, Lucy follows to the Door 
Post Tap, elbowed into an alley corner off center.
Inside, no light, yet each who enters sees as if at noon, 
as if amid countless bell tolls out on Ecclesiastes Road.

Get happy.

This happy night of the coming of the thief, the thieves. 
Rapture soon, final coming. Look busy. Look business. 
Strictly business.

Off-key at Washington and Michigan, to the rhythm 
of seven stained white empty five-gallon paint cans, 
each a glorious virtue, Hambone sings the Servant Song, 
including the verse of enslavement, usually excised, 
including the upstairs/downstairs verse. Jack of Lent 
has testified, and his testimony is true.

Say it again: Rejoice!

Sweat and blood. The chalice of blood equity. Bile 
and bitter herbs.

This is the night of the howl of the self-dead at the 
moment of the trigger. My brother in rain-snow.

Our hen mother — true mother — abundant breasts, 
tender arms, comfort. The four-letter name.

Clap along.

From gloom to grace, down and through and into 
and above and beyond the end. Child of the 
Century meditates and discerns.

O care!  O wonder! O happy fault, dazzling, blazing.  
Night as day, glad sadness. Innocence and concord.  

Work of bees, work of hands.  Mother bee, torch of 
flame. One and many fires, incense and aroma.

The proper motion of Morning Star, Queen of Heaven, 
Centauri, Groombridge, Lynx, Crux, Hyena.

Center of mass of every thing.

Patrick T. Reardon, a Chicago Tribune reporter from 1976 to 2009, is the author of seven poetry collections. His latest is Every Marred Thing: A Time in America, the winner of the 2024 Faulkner-Wisdom Prize from the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society of New Orleans (Lavender Ink). He is a five-time nominee in poetry for a Pushcart Prize. His poetry has appeared in America, RHINO, Commonweal, After Hours, Autumn Sky, Burningword Literary Journal and other journals.

Amen

The white flag waves, after we come to the end
of what we don’t know what to say—amen.
We have said our piece, and our trouble too,
and You know better than we, what we meant to say.
“So be it.”—So be what? So be all that I’ve asked or said?
If that is the case, then I am the master and You the genie.
A heresy—nothing could be further from the truth.
You take no commands, and in no ways are You bound.
Amen. It is not the exclamation at the end of an imperative,
instead it is the little hand that reaches up
to take hold before crossing the road.

Michael McNerlin Jr. is an emerging poet from the Jersey Shore. His work is rooted in the numinous and explores how profound theological truths manifest themselves in unexpected ways. When he is not musing on how best to articulate the Summum Bonum, he is the grateful pastor of a small church in Wanamassa, New Jersey. He currently spends his nights holed up in his study working toward his first poetry collection.

The Infamy of Love
 
The air turned purple, cubicles of flesh 
opening into an amphitheater of taunts;
a desert crown, a kingdom of  jeers;
the postulator of equivocation mouthing
the infernal alphabet of concessions.

Strewn palms in a field of lilies,
a tau cross emblazoned with light
become slivered shame drug across
stones once bread, the infamy of love--
ruby droplets, weeping canticles,
shattered bones, a bosom ripped
from its frame.

A mother's woe, prophecy's progress
beyond all telling;  a veil imprinted
with the pain of ages,  a temple within,
a temple without; a black sun rises
and sets at the 9th hour, gamblers' lot;
guilt, the foul odor of shame; clouds
turned to pyre smoke.

Another's burial plot, the place 
where death will die no more;
yet the high priests more
In love with death than life--
"The body was stolen," they scowled.

                 
           

Philip C. Kolin is the Distinguished Professor of English (Emeritus) and Editor Emeritus of the Southern Quarterly at the University of Southern Mississippi. He has published over 40 books, including twelve collections of poetry and chapbooks. Among his most recent titles are Emmett Till in Different States (Third World Press, 2015), Reaching Forever (Poiema Series, Cascade Books, 2019), Delta Tears (Main Street Rag, 2020), Wholly God’s: Poems (Wind and Water Press, 2021), and Americorona: Poems about the Pandemic (Wipf and Stock, 2021).

Trappist Woods
Before Vigils
 
Can you take the leap of faith
that this deer’s moonlit eyes are God?
Otherwise, how many dark nights will find you here, 
wandering woods between the hermitage 
and monastery at four a.m., praying 
for what’s right in front of you?
This whitetail’s two wide-open answers 
to Saint Benedict’s question: What do you seek? 
become obvious, once you realize 
there’s nothing out there to find 
that isn’t already God, already You.
And that includes the nightjar, 
and the Eastern Whip-poor-will.

What to do, then? —when, for so long, 
we’ve gotten it so wrong— is a dilemma,
our I-think-therefore-I-am,
subject-needs-an-object world
eclipsing our moon-wide-illumined eyes 
from seeing deer, Deity, and planet 
as ourselves.

Contemplative life—
hard to describe really, except as what it isn’t: 
Via Negativa. Negative Way. What can be said, 
spelled, spoken, named: too small to be ineffable.
No two-ness, either. Flower not foreign to fragrance. 
Star not separate from shine. Humanity 
undivided from Divinity. 

What you want, what you’re after is pond: 
a natural contemplative, reflecting what is. 
Julian’s hazelnut vision too, perhaps, all creation 
like a kernel, oned, held, loved, inside Mystery.
Wholly here. Holy Now. Holy Darkness. 
Unknowing transcending certainty. 
No burning bush, no bell. Only heaven 
giving you stars to count on, owl-song 
for your compass crooning through trees. 
Your life, your love planted
in understory-cloisters so ancient, 
what but Silence could pronounce 
the wordless vows of stability 
centuries take to root here?



Julian’s hazelnut vision: Described in her book, Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich (1342-1416 CE).
oned (or oneing): Julian’s terms for a process that leads to profound oneness, beyond mere intimacy, with the Divine.
vows of stability: Trappist (Cistercian) monks take a vow of stability to the community/place in which they live.

A 2026 Pushcart nominee, Daniel Skach-Mills’s poems have appeared in numerous publications, including: Pensive Journal, The Christian Century, Sojourners, and Sufi (Featured Poet). His book, The Hut Beneath the Pine: Tea Poems was a 2012 Oregon Book Award finalist. A former Trappist monk, Daniel lives with his husband in Portland, Oregon, where he served fifteen years as a docent for Lan Su Chinese Garden. He was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer in 2024.

Music for Tenebrae

shadows of a ceremony - 
rarely enacted - haunt the culture 
seamless robe of balanced voices
moving down the diatonic stair 

winds and birdsong all fall silent 
skies leach their colour westward
the nasal plangency – astringent 
signifies exquisite pain


a solitary bird is flying 
fast and high against the blue
whether some herald of deliverance 
or the fell hawk coming for a lamb

pick up a corner of the veil  
if there is blood it should be washed
not with your tears but rather with 
the grace of mordent harmonies

winter takes toll on chantry walls
after the rinsing of spring showers
snails move in damp grass slick
as sweet agonies of passiontide


entering that velvet darkness where
the final candle burns - a black shape 
like a wing - high up a pillar 
under the clerestory beats 

on the dim-lit belly of pale stone
moving against a harmony
of soaring voices – yet dispersing
as their final chord resolves

Since retiring from parish ministry, Tony Lucas continues with writing and spiritual direction. His poetry has appeared widely, on both sides of the Atlantic and he is working on a new collection, to add to those previously published by Stride and Stairwell Books.

A Spell for Banishment

To banish a demon, one must name it.

Last weekend, I attended my 20^th college reunion. But it was more than a reunion—it was an exorcism, a reclamation of a sacred space that had been defiled.

In college, I was sexually harassed for two years straight by a (wrongfully) trusted mentor. Like most predators, this professor would probably deny that he did any such thing. He never tried to kiss me or grope me, he would protest. He never demanded sexual favors in return for grades. Never mind that he strongly implied that I should have given him somethingin return for writing my letters of recommendation for graduate school. And never mind that he gave me a Valentine’s day card professing his love for me. And that, when he bought me an expensive dictionary as a gift, and I awkwardly stammered my gratitude for his friendship, he said, “Oh, Harper, we’re more than friends.” Never mind all that.

I didn’t know what to say when he gave me that dictionary, but I had also long since learned that saying something wasn’t enough. This professor had pressured me go to lunch with him at the faculty club almost every week, to the point where some of my acquaintances began asking me if I was dating him. I had tried to say no to these lunches—hadin fact said no very explicitly—but he had just laughed and waved his hand and said, “Oh, now, don’t be silly. Come on, let’s go.”  

At the time—as a 20-year-old perfectionist raised in the conservative South—I didn’t realize that I could have kept on saying no. Or that, when he refused to respect my decision, I could have walked out the door. I could have dropped his classes. I could have changed my major. But I didn’t know any those things were possible. I had told my friends what was happening, and they were horrified on my behalf, but they didn’t know what I should do, either. And I had told my parents, but they just told me to keep my head down and push through the discomfort for one last year. He wasn’t doing anything that bad, after all.

I have long since forgiven my parents for this failure—the failure to raise a raging storm on my behalf—because they are also deeply loving and supportive human beings. But for twenty years, I found it impossible to forgive this professor. Forgiveness felt like an excuse, an exoneration. And even more viscerally, I could not forgive him because I was still afraid. Afraid of him, yes, but even more afraid of myself: my anxiety, my tendency to freeze, my sense of utter powerlessness.  

So, I avoided my college campus because I dreaded running into him there. What would he say if he saw me? Would he wave me down and smile and make oblivious, meaningless small talk? Would he scowl at me, fully aware of his transgressions, defying me to label them? Would he think of me as a former student? An ex-girlfriend? A ticking time bomb? And I certainly didn’t know what I would say or do in return. Maybe selective mutism would overwhelm me, as it sometimes does when I am deeply upset. Or maybe I would scream: “You are a twisted, evil, disgusting troll!” and he would call the campus police on me. Or maybe I would vomit on him, which would serve him right.

In any case, I moved to a faraway city and pretended my college didn’t exist. I avoided all thought or mention of this professor, as best I could, but it didn’t help that I also became a professor in the same general field. It meant that I sometimes saw his name in a book or article, and it would punch me right in the gut. One time, I never submitted a book review I had agreed to write—never even read past the front matter—because the author thanked my abuser in the acknowledgements. Another time, a colleague mentioned his name at a conference dinner, and I began shaking violently. “Please don’t mention that name in my presence because he is a fucking creep,” I said. The dinner conversation sort of dried up after that.

I hated him, and I could not forgive him, and his memory stuck in me like a black locust thorn. For decades, I meditated, prayed, sang, chanted mantras, lit candles, took nature walks—all with this black locust thorn in my heart. I always struggled on the Day of Atonement, not because I had sins that needed forgiving (which I did and do, of course), but because I myself could not forgive. What is a Day of Atonement without forgiveness? I finally gained some relief when I assigned that enormous task to God, whoever or whatever that is. Let God forgive him, if God wills—to forgive is divine, after all, and I am only human.

Perhaps paradoxically, I eventually discovered that anger was the key to dislodging this black thorn. Anger and a fierce, fuck-you kind of defiance that has been difficult for me to access in my life. Don’t get me wrong, Prozac helps, too. But in addition to prescribing pills, my psychiatrist helped me connect the dots from my repressive Southern upbringing, a molesting babysitter, a sexual assault freshman year of college, these two straight years of sexual harassment, and, later, an emotionally abusive partner. She taught me to identify the deep pain that leaked out in nightmares and unexpected phobias—fear of flying, heights, bridges, highways, sunburn, dish soap. If I was going to get out of this psychic vortex, I had to learn to access my voice. I had to learn to access my anger. Fawning and freezing and fleeing had not helped me. I would have to fight.

So, I made plans. I suggested to my best college friends that we attend our 20^th reunion. (Actually, it was my 21^st reunion—look at me breaking the rules). In my heart, I held this vision of the reunion like a candle: me, in a sparkling party dress and ferocious Doc Martens, stomping up and down the hallway of the humanities building, burning purifying sage and clutching a black crow feather to symbolize death and rebirth and freedom. I would stomp through the halls with my friends and my talismans and my terrible, terrible anger—and I would set myself free. Maybe professors would pop out of their offices and scowl at the ruckus I was causing. Maybe the burning sage would set off the fire alarm. I didn’t care. Let them scowl and wail. Fuck the expectations of quiescence and compliance that had left me vulnerable for so many years.

When the day actually came, it wasn’t quite so dramatic as all that. But it was good. I set foot on a campus that I had avoided for more than 20 years. I met with old friends in the college quad, where we drank cheap beer and visited our old dorm rooms and reminisced about bygone times. We toured the campus, where we discovered that the student pub still smells satisfyingly of pizza grease and spilled Natty Light, even though it tragically no longer sells beer by the pitcher. We marveled at how young the students look, as middle-aged people are wont to do. We entered the nondenominational chapel, with its breathtaking gold mosaics glittering in the lamplight, just as the sun was setting, the perfect time to say a silent prayer.

And then, in the falling darkness, I went to the humanities quad with one of my best friends. I hugged the old tree growing there, a twisted live oak I used to sit with while I meditated upon Martin Buber’s I and Thou. I was so glad it was still there, my old companion. And then we went inside—into the heart of darkness. But our minds do funny things to protect us, don’t they? I had daydreamed about this moment for years, and I had nightdreamed about it for months. But my brain had completely blocked out which doorway actually led into the humanities building. I first led my friend through an adjoining doorway into the languages building (where to be fair, I had also taken many classes), and I stomped through those halls, fists balled, ready to fight a metaphorical fight. I went in several more doors, all leading off the same quad, until there was only one door left. “Um, I’m pretty sure that one is the humanities building,” my friend said.

She was right. She opened the door, and my adrenal system shouted, “Don’t go in there!” as though I were a cheerleader in some horror movie. When we entered the building, my heart rate spiked; when we went up to the second floor, I began to gasp for breath. We walked down the empty hallway, and I saw the familiar names of other professors—so many of them were still working there, 20 years later, wrapped tight in that ivory embrace. I squeezed my friend’s hand harder and harder, like I used to squeeze my mom’s hand during an airplane takeoff.  And then we found the door with the dreaded name. I cried. That had certainly not been part of the plan. But it turns out, tears are as cleansing as smoldering sage and as freeing as a black crow feather.

When we left the building, my friend handed me a pen and paper. “In case you wanted to write something down. And then we can burn it, or rip it up, or bury it, or whatever.” This is what I wrote: “[Name Redacted], you should not have sexually harassed me. It was wrong. I forgive you.” I named him, and I named what he did to me. I named the demon, and I banished it. I ripped the paper into tiny pieces and sprinkled them at the base of my Martin Buber tree.

I am not afraid anymore, not of him, and not of myself. That’s what this trip was really about. It was not just a reunion with my classmates. It was a ritual conjuring of my frightened, silent 20-year-old self, so that I could whisper in her ear, “Don’t worry. This place does not belong to him. It belongs to you.”

Harper N. Shawe (she/they) is an author of fiction and creative nonfiction who centers the stories of women, LGBTQ+ folks, and other marginalized groups. Their writing is inspired by a multi-denominational spirituality and a love of nature. They live near Philadelphia, PA with their family and their tabby cat.