Amethyst Review

A Goose

We want God’s holy spirit like a blanket wrapped
around us, padding us from any hurt,
or at least a dove that is nearly tame.
We can feel her fast-beating tiny heart in our palms
and each soft feather against our fingertip.
We set her free to fly in beauty and just then --

A wild goose lands on our arm for Christ’s sake!
Flapping and squawking and flying
around our heads. We never know
where to look or what might happen!
This gray goose of God’s holy spirit
with shining wings.

Rachel Ann Russell has recently earned a Master of Arts at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., and has taken a number of classes at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Her special place is where art turns into joy and church. She has been published, among other places, in Christian Century, the Maryland Literary Review, Time of Singing, Christian Courier, and Heart of Flesh Literary Journal.

  Swallowtail in Flight

The butterfly flits down the driveway ahead of me.
I am lost in thought,
and don’t pay attention to her.
Then I see her the next day and the day after that.
She is a swallowtail, black with sheens 
of iridescent blue and touches of  rust.
She is beautiful and I finally stop to admire her.

“Hi Mom” I blurt out,
realizing the ridiculousness of what I am saying.
My mother said she’d never come back,
but if she did, she jokingly said it would be as a bird.
A butterfly isn’t so much of stretch then, is it?
Especially one that hangs around me 
every day on my walks.

I slow down to watch her.
She stops when I stop,
sitting where the grass and gravel meet,
her wings slowly moving back and forth.

Finally, I move and she takes flight
She flies a full 360 around me,
her colorful wings a flurry of motion.

Then she floats away.
“Come back” I say,
And she does, the next day 
And the day after that.

Linda Polk Haslanger recently started writing after a forty-year break. Her work has been published in The Albion Review and has been accepted for future publication in Main Street Rag’s “North Coast Voices” Anthology, as well as Purple Aardvark’s Inaugural Anthology. Her poetry was also selected to appear in the 2025 Detroit Lakes Poetry Walk, and she was a semi-finalist for the 2025 Lefty Blondie Press First Chapbook contest. Recently retired, she likes to volunteer and walk in nature.

Prayer for Faith

Though I have lost my faith, 
I still want to write about how 

the sun rises over fields of corn 
day after day, faithful, as it sets 

in the west. 
That reddish orange  

glow leaving a seam of light 
on the horizon- 

I pray that faith will find me
in its own sober way. 

Call me back to understanding 
what I do not understand 

about myself. 
That I am not lost.

Let my poem, like the sun’s shadow,
be a prayer, holy in everything.

Mary Howlett lives in Waterford. Her poems are published in Southword, The Honest Ulsterman, Waxed Lemon, Drawn to the Light Press, Poem Alone, Steel Jackdaw, Swerve Magazine, Poetry Bus 12, The Get Real, Frogmore Papers and elsewhere. She is Highly Commended in Cathal Buí and 12th Bangor Poetry competitions.

Mirror Images

Above my desk, I see the Theotokos, 
Mary’s face at an angle, the infant 
resting his cheek against hers. The icon’s 
proportions portray Mary’s face 
large as the sun’s; the infant’s, 
next to hers, like a moon. 
Together, they suggest an altitude 
above earth but not yet in the heavens.
Looking down, my hands are still,
palms up.

Hands, like mirror images, represent 
two beings joined together at the hip.
If my hands have any power to move 
or write, my hands owe their strength 
to these oblique angles of sinew and bone, 
the joining together 
of different reference points, 
like the artist’s converging lines pointing 
to a horizon that is always 
just beyond the curve of the earth—
Like sun’s gold when it touches the horizon,
Jesus’ breath, so close 
Mary feels it on her cheek.

Tammy Iralu lives in New Mexico with her husband and daughter. She enjoys backpacking, hiking, and breaking bread with family and friends. She has published or forthcoming in the anthology Sanctuary, Mukoli: The Magazine for Peace, Cowley Magazine, The Other Side, and elsewhere. She participated in the San Juan National Forest Artist-in-Residence Program: Aspen Guard Station in Mancos, Colorado. Read her work at https://substack.com/@tammyiralu.

Rorate Caeli

The vowels of my body 
reverberate round and visceral, 
ruminate on velleities, Rorate Caeli, 
on the revolutions of Venus, 
of valves and vaults, of rubies, 
of Revelations, ruminate on the vortex of veins
that run and return, the veins that heard 
language rendered through viscera, 
felt rhythm, vermillion and swathed,
sacreligious, sibilant, sonorous
language that passed through skin
retrograde and radiant,
the swooning and surging word
was sanguine, it held me, 
until the heavens dropped down,
               a trillion eyes fluttering silver-washed, 
the light appeared,
the rain opened the earth.		

Abigail Robejsek is a writer from Cleveland, Ohio.

Calfaria

I push against the doorspring’s stern restraint;
it gives; 
I almost tumble sideways in. 

Calfaria. 
The polished walnut pews’ and pulpit’s smell 
competes 
with musty air which hasn’t changed for days.

Crane-fly mote beams congregate in spotlit streams
from windows treble high, made active 
by the air my entrance brought.

The high and stark diagonals 
from right to left
reveal the nature of the space. 

It’s silent but it’s full.

Below the pulpit 
to our right the marble plaque,
not ‘Lest We Forget’  but ‘er cof am’:

er (so that) cof (we should remember) am
and then three fallen names, 
with years filled in.

A dignity of pallid marble 
faced in black.
Er, the subjunctive, like ut, for when there’s doubt.

I breathe conviction.
That the wasted dead were present as we are.

The one thing sacred is a life.

J. P. Lancaster was brought up in Barry, a coastal town in the Vale of Glamorgan, south Wales. He was educated at St John’s College, Oxford, and Leicester University. He has then studied and taught in Canada, Wales and Scotland.

This Once Was Pangea

Creator of time and space,
teach me the patience of a planet
steady in orbit, the silent
wisdom of a stone, the resilience
of mountains eroding into
the earth, the persistence of
glacial growth, the imperceivable
shifting of tectonic plates, the
movement of the motionless — 
like a slumbering
bear in hibernation, a cocooned
caterpillar in chrysalis, teach me
the transforming power
of stillness.

Ariel Tovlev (he/they) is a queer and trans poet whose writing focuses on identity, spirituality, and finding beauty in the ordinary. He received his BFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and his MFA from Chapman University. He has been published in Wayfarers Magazine, ONE ART, and Pensive Journal, among others. In addition to being a writer, he is among the first out transgender individuals to be ordained as a rabbi. They have created original liturgy which speaks to the trans experience. He lives in DC with his spouse, their four cats, and a multitude of houseplants.

Consequence  

Eleven minutes of consequence
leavens every day. Morning by morning 
contemplation, as necessary as coffee, 
gives direction, shows the way. 

When I question were my choices worthy? 
Did my life at least break even?
Folding my hands above the ruins,
I pray for the benevolent gaze.

My question is answered with a question,
“Can you expect a stonemason to build 
a suspension bridge? He chooses 
what to build with the courage he has.

Frank Desiderio produces two video poems each week on his Substack, Holy Poetry, https://holipoetry.substack.com. His poems have appeared in numerous journals. He lives in Manhattan on Lenape homelands and finds joy in his family, poetry and doing Tai Chi.

Angels

A trove of angels fills my mind--
how in Renaissance paintings they can shape
themselves into whatever forms they choose,
round-bottom cherubs or just curly haired heads
with faces beaming down on people at picnics,

or appearing at the Annunciation 
with glittering wings and robes rustling
with the news whispered in Mary's ear,

or appearing as full-bodied robed men
wringing their hands in lament
over the death of Christ,
their wings at a standstill in midair,

or flying to the rescue, golden hair lifted
in the wind, hand staying 
Abraham's hand poised to strike 
Isaac's taut, tender neck, the knife glowing
in the stream of light--
Abraham passing his test of faith,

or obscured by night,
the strong-armed shadow
Jacob wrestled with until daybreak--
Jacob winning the match over his darkness.

Janet Krauss enjoyed teaching English at St. Basil Seminary for 29 years and Fairfield University for 39 years. She continues to mentor students. lead a poetry discussion at the Wilton Library, participate in the CT. Poetry Society Workshop and other poetry groups. She is the Poetry Program Director of the Black Rock Guild. She has 2 books of poetry: Borrowed Scenery (Yuganta Press) and Through the Trees of Autumn (Spartina Press). She is a widely published poet and many of her poems have been published in Amethyst Review and her haiku in Cold Moon Journal.

Abraham

In the salt marshes of Ur you first heard the voice,
though not yet a voice, nor a whisper:
Something wordless and soft,
like the rattle of cattails,
the sigh of papyrus,
it soughed in your ear,
your inner ear,
like a desert breath,
and suddenly
the whole world
went off
balance.

And something said:
“Move.”

“Go.”

Something said:
“Elsewhere.”

And if someone had asked
(though no one asked),
“Who is this god?”
you would have said,
“I do not know his name,
but he smells of mud flats
and salt and…”
(though no one asked)
“no other gods attend him.”

Jeffrey Essmann is an essayist and poet living in New York. His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals, among them Dappled Things, the St. Austin Review, Amethyst Review, America Magazine, Pensive Journal, Forma Journal, and The Society of Classical Poets. He is a certified catechist with the Archdiocese of New York, a Benedictine oblate of St. Mary’s Abbey in Morristown, NJ, and editor of The Catholic Poetry Room.