Amethyst Review

My Anthill Teacher 

I was on a retreat in my late twenties. During a break in the schedule I walked into the woods adjoining the retreat center, carrying a little backpack holding a bottle of water, some fruit, and a book on the Psalms.

I found an open space, grabbed my book and water and sat on my pack. Easily distractable I soon turned my attention to the impressive number of black ants scurrying across the sandy soil. 

I tried to detect their direction. Where was their nest? I moved forward on my knees to follow a few and spotted one with a bit of leaf in her mouth. A-ha! She must be going back to the nest. I got to my feet. Bent over I followed her, but she wasn’t a straight-line traveler. I staggered above her until she got into some grass, then bushes and gone.

New strategy. Standing, still bent over, I walked in a circle looking for little sandy piles. I widened the diameter of my search zone several times but nada. 

Time to return to the retreat center so I went back to get my discarded book and the rest of my stuff. As I reached for my book I saw, a foot behind my seat, the largest anthill I had ever seen. It was up to my knees with multiple entrances. It looked like an Anasazi cliff dwelling.  

I laughed at my poor observation skills. I hadn’t yet been diagnosed with ADHD, but I knew myself well enough not to be shocked. 

I thought this experience might be significant, not that anything had been arranged for my benefit but because on retreat we have the time and intentionality to reflect on the lessons of nature. Emerson wrote in Nature, “what is a farm but a mute gospel?” If true for a farm, surely true for the natural world and animal kingdom.

The significance escaped me as had the ant nest. Oh well, I figured, perhaps more will be revealed.

Many years later, I heard a reference to Jacob’s ladder, the dream imagery in Genesis 28:10-17, so I picked up my Bible to check it out. 

You may know the backstory. 

Jacob has tricked his blind father, Isaac, into giving him the birthright blessing that should have gone to older brother, Esau. Their mother, Rebekah, and Isaac tell Jacob to flee Esau’s wrath and travel to Rebekah’s clan to find a Hebrew wife.

At the end of his first day in flight Jacob sleeps and dreams of a ladder extending from earth to heaven. Angels descend and ascend the ladder above which stands the Lord who reassures Jacob with the extravagant promises made to his grandfather, Abraham – countless descendants, ownership of the land, greatness of his people throughout the world. 

Jacob awakes and says, Surely, the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not.

In this place. This phrase landed for me, not merely because of my anthill experience. 

Since childhood I had actively searched for contact with the divine. I was a devout altar boy. I won the theology award at my Catholic high school. More intensive theology courses at university where I also took high doses of the psychedelic drugs that promised transcendent experience. 

I chanted with the Krishnas in San Francisco, danced with the Sufis in New York, hiked over a mountain to drop in at 3 a.m. to a monastery in Vermont. And I feared I had failed because I didn’t become a monk and never made it to India. 

What was I missing and why couldn’t I find it?

I became a sociology professor so I could help students question the received knowledge of their society and culture. My education as a social scientist trained me to be skeptical, to review research primarily to find the problems in method and conclusions. This fed my inclination toward apophatic theology, the “negative way” to God by rejecting what cannot be true. Like many ex-Catholics, I shed iconography, sacraments, and theological certainty. I taught myself to question any experience I might for a moment consider sacred. 

I started attending Quaker meetings because of simplicity and the history of peace and social justice activism. I figured they’d be a good place to find deeply committed comrades, not a place for making any deep connection with Spirit. 

Then, at a silent retreat I found John Yungblut’s Discovering God Within, one of the many spiritual pamphlets produced by a Quaker retreat center. Well, yes, the inward light, of course. I had heard about that. 

But as I read further, I started to experience one of those moments of apparently deep connection. Could the simple Quaker way possibly be as profound as Tibetan or Zen Buddhism? Could I really experience the divine without chanting and intensive training in yoga and meditation? 

The Lord is in this place. 

I am now in my seventies, and I’ve come to believe that what I sought so intensively as a younger man has been with me all the time. Well, beside me and within me. 

I had experienced the inward light of conscience and companionship, internal and with others, and found it insufficiently dramatic. 

I understand now that some love affairs are gentle and abiding; some are passionately euphoric and painful as described by some mystics.

I no longer feel I must see through the glass clearly before I die. Why did I think I had to? Why did I think I could? 

Ursula Leguin gave me spiritual direction decades ago when I read The Lathe of Heaven:

Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason it by using reason. To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.

I think I was nearly destroyed on that lathe. I would have suffered more if I hadn’t met my wife and discovered the gifts of the spirit that come with the challenges and blessings of a committed marriage and family. 

My family and life within a challenging and supportive Quaker community have taught me I don’t need to learn or know anything other than the lessons of patience, forgiveness, and love.

James Hannon is a psychotherapist in Massachusetts where he accompanies adolescents and adults recovering from addictions, disappointments and deceptions. His work has appeared in Blue Lake Review, Cold Mountain Review, Heimat Review, Pensive, Psaltery and Lyre, and other journals and in Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets. He writes about politics and culture on his substack, Joyful Resistance (jimhannon.substack.com).

In the cathedral, on the morning when I learned of Mary Oliver’s death
	Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. Los Angeles, California.


alabaster
light spills 
slant sugar 

pipe organ
hums 
deepest cherry

and my bones 
are jealous to inhabit 
the sweetest part – 

I am hungry to be overwhelmed with being – 

to press my spine to this cold tile
let my eyelids flutter 
soft shadow
in smooth pool of pearl

and be mingled with rumble – 

and didn’t she say at last, and too soon?

and how splendid 
after a lifetime of wondering
for her to know hush of pebble 
dwell in throat of lily – 

I will dig these heels into moment		
clamor cloud-full grateful

(of course it is raining)

Bryn Cavin is a current MFA student at Pacific University. She holds a B.A. (Hons.) in Literature & Writing from Whitworth University and has held writing positions with such organizations as Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition, Tahirih Justice Center, Museum of Glass, and the Smithsonian. Bryn is a former Assistant Managing Editor of Rock & Sling Literary Journal. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her boxer-pittie mix, Dalloway.

A Mother’s Hope

Hope is the only step you can take at the start.
When you wrap your newborn in yellow gingham
and wait for a sun-painted, early October day
for your first walk to the corner tree.
You tuck in her toes.
Because though she broke into the world,
she is still a seed, and your arms alone
don’t feel enough like nurtured ground.

Remembering hope in the first sight
of her heartbeat at the ultrasound.
Surrounded by a sea of empty space,
a possibility she would grow into.
A rapid pulse in the swirl of a slower one.
Now her heartbeat is still mixed with yours.

Hope is that she might not yet see shadows.
Her eyes are not yet their true color,
and her vision unfocused.
Below the tree, you hope she sees dappled sunlight.
But you sense winter’s edge in the first-leaves’
fall from the maple.

Hope is that there, you remember a stream,
today you only hear it, like birdsong from hollows 
in branches. Here you send your baby to start her story, 
like the bramble-arched brook,
the water hidden. 

You know only how it flows in this valley,
the green things rooted alongside,
sheltering trees before the bend, 
until the creek, at last, can’t be seen. 

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.

Splitting the Atom

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
 – from the Hindu Sanskrit scriptural text TheBhagavad Gita,
   quoted by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the architect of the atom bomb.

We humans have a habit
of leaving evidence of our crimes.
We devour whole the forbidden fruit
from the tree of knowledge,
spitting out the seeds.
Cavalier, confident we are safe,
we make our getaway.
But behind us,
the seeds sprout.
Tender green shoots spiral up,
growing stronger in the sun.
Soon these new trees
spread their wings.
New apples, sour and green
in their youth,
ripen to a luscious blood-red,
their existence proof of our crime:
we have scattered the seeds
that will spread knowledge
by luring all who seek its secrets
to fall under its weight.
We are culpable of the widespread
destruction of innocence,
from seeking the fulsome fruit
to sowing the fallen seed.

Cynthia Pitman, author of poetry collections The White Room, Blood Orange, Breathe, and Broken, has been published in Amethyst Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Literary Yard, Third Wednesday (One Sentence Poem finalist), Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art (Pushcart Prize nominee), and other journals, and in anthologies Pain and Renewal, Brought to Sight & Swept Away, Nothing Divine Dies, and What is All This Sweet Work?

Melissa Ann Reed, after offering the IB and Cambridge literature courses overseas, is now a private international educator and exhibited Chinese calligrapher and brush painter. Her post-doc research is remarked by literary, psychology and medical journals. She collaborated with Mabel S. Chu Tow and University Press of America to publish ‘Strange Kindness,’ now curated by Rowman & Littlefield. An award winning poet, her poems, published by literary arts journals, are included in the chapbooks, making oxygen, FLP 2020 and ekphrastics & eccentricities, Kelsay Books, 2023. Kelsay Books published her full-length poetry book, he for she she for he, February 2025.

In Orbit 

In sleep, a comet stopped beside the garden.
Its voice was the green taste of running water.
It said, I will come down on the seventh day,
then passed through the wall without breaking it.

I woke where night was becoming a window.
Morning carried a blue scent, like an unopened road.
I wrote the date inside my diary,
and roots began to grow beneath the number.

Since then, the sky has moved closer to the house.
Birds circle a place that has not yet arrived.
Perhaps the comet is already on the earth,
waiting for it to notice.

Olya K-Mehri is a Forward Prize-nominated, London-born poet of Iranian heritage whose poetry explores landscape as a site of mystery, the spirit of place, and the quiet presence of the sacred in the natural world. She is a researcher in environmental ethics and philosophy, and the founder of the Rooted Art Collective. Her work has appeared in various anthologies, as well as in print and digital publications, including Osmosis Press, Dust Poetry Magazine, Rough Diamond Poetry, and Seedlings.

before visible dawn


the sky is a bruise
any stars that might have shone 
long since disappeared

bare branches sway round 
nimbus shift their leaden bulks 
weight against shadow

atop a slight band 
of subtle lighter grey 
suffusing into 

the leavening dark 
all the hues mingle and swirl
nothing linear 

this is how dawn begins
is this how everything begins:

from what we can’t see
and therefore name darkness void
when it is neither

and both

	

John Janelle Backman composes rensakus (a series of connected haikus) as a cornerstone of her daily prayer. Most mornings she watches the ever-changing sky, examines her deepest self, and writes a rensaku that both responds to what she sees and reveres the divine spirit. Readers are invited to draw the poem into themselves and make it their own. Outside of prayer, Janelle has published essays, poems, or both in The Iowa Review, Catapult, Typehouse, HerStry, and Amethyst Review, among other places. Find her at backmanwriter.com.

Soft Ruin

Inside the chrysalis,
the body begins by forgetting itself.
Muscles loosen its faithful grip.
The old mouth dissolves.
Legs surrender their labor.
Even the patient architecture of hunger
is taken apart until nothing remains,
but a pale, breathing hush where
certainty once lived.

Metamorphosis.

As if becoming were gentler than this.
From within, it is a slow flood,
each familiar room of the body
filling with a void,
each remembered shape softening
into something that can no longer hold its own name.

There is no applause for a miracle.
Only surrender.
I know something of that,
my whole life in shackles.

There are lives we do not leave behind;
they dissolve around us until the person
who first entered them exists only
in fragments,
drifting beneath the surface
like leaves returning to dark water.

I did not choose to change.
I simply grew grew beyond the borders
that once held me, and the world,
faithful to its own turning,
never paused long enough
for my roots to understand
they were no longer touching earth.

So I taught myself the quiet ways of unmaking.
How to loosen my grip without failure.
How to survive the long country of shapelessness,
where every morning arrives wearing a stranger’s face,
and even hope must learn to move without wings.

Yet hidden inside the ruin,
a small congregation of living cells
keeps its impossible promise,
building what the breaking could never imagine. 

Perhaps that is what grace has always been:
not escaping the undoing,
but discovering that the deepest part of us
was never asked to dissolve.

May Garner is an author and poet residing in rural Ohio. She has been writing for fifteen years and sharing her work online for over a decade. She is the author of two poetry collections, Withered Rising (2023) and Melancholic Muse (2025). Her work has appeared in more than seventy literary magazines and anthologies. She is the recipient of first place in the 4th Annual Poet-It Like Poe Poetry Contest and a winner of the 2026 Woody Barlow Poetry Contest. Find her work on Instagram (@crimson.hands).

You, Whom I Have Named

You, whom I have named static between radio stations -
I heard You in the morning humdrum
[7:53 A.M. middling 94.3 FM and 95.1 FM],
the peach fuzz of signal searching,
each buzz before a noise noses in.
Sentimentally, I always let the dial dillydally there like
an offering to You: my attention with no demand for
Your intention.

You, whom I have named a rose in the pavement -
it was surely You, emerging from concrete cracks,
red and green against a sea of rusted grey,
form conquering over function, a kind of alleycat angel.
I watered it once, as
an offering to You: my outpouring, for a singular gift of beauty.

You, whom I have named the summer light after streetlamps -
that slate-sea hour when the sky is a swirling seascape.
I throw my wrists out to west and east, fingers unwrapped,
calling in the wind, calling at the windows, at all times
an offering to You: seeing salvation in the lingering light,
faded but never faded away.

You, whom I have named a man in a novelty t-shirt on Victoria Beach, June 2026,
I mean it, because if cotton can curl my mug into a meaty smile, 
it is an affirmation that an aliveness courses through this conduit
and it does not ask for blessing,
and no high and holy miracle ever did.
And so even that paltry moment of giggling is
an offering to You: my laughter, measured out in dad jokes
on sand-scratched shirts.

You, whom I have named nothing at all
because all that I can say of You falls short,
and everything is nothing in full colours, 
and You left a porch light on for me, 
in case I want to come in to experience
how wonderful nothing ever is. So, here,
an offering to You: my feet on the porch 
steps, I will leave the light on for the others.

Magnus Briar is a poet from Winnipeg, Canada. Their first poetry collection, Prairie Chicken, appeared on several Amazon bestseller lists. They have performed their original poetry at festivals across the region.