Amethyst Review

Going to Alaska

I’m grounded, no matter how fast I’m going, I can come back.
My legs may take me far away, but my soul will come back home.

~Ellen Bindman-Hicks, “Night Leaping”

My daughter Ellen should be thirty-four now. When she was a toddler, I opened a daycare in our home. For many months the children played a game they’d invented called, “Going to Alaska.” Sometimes they traveled by plane, sometimes by train, sometimes they rode in a sled, sometimes they walked. Underneath the kitchen table, in the well of the half-pulled-out sofa, or on the lid of the sand-table were some of their imaginative vehicles. Many animals and dolls accompanied them to Alaska. It was a game full of excitement where ideas emerged organically, in call and response, like a song.

The children always asked me to play, but I’d usually just reply,

You’re going to Alaska? Have a nice trip!

Beyond that, I had discovered my participation would immediately throw a damper on the game. Occasionally, I’d try again, squeezing under the table with the kids, their eyes joyful.

This is a plane! one announces, We’re going to Alaska!

I wonder, “Is it my turn?” So I say something dumb like,

What are we going to do when we get to Alaska?

The kids look at me. Pause. One picks up the thread again: We’re going to Alaska!

Okay. Try again. Make plane sounds.

Me: Look out the window at the clouds!

Again, no takers. The game fizzles out, to be resumed another day.

What am I not getting? It occurs to me that to learn the rules I need to shut up and pay attention. I begin to listen to how the children play the game.

We’re in a train!

We’re going to Alaska!

We’re going to a museum.

There are gonna be bears in the museum—and dinosaurs!

There’s airplanes in the museum!

Let’s go to a fair.

Yeah! Let’s go to a fair!

There are cows at the fair. Remember the cows at the fair?

Let’s go to a restaurant.

We’re going to a restaurant!

We’re here!

The children climb out of the train and play restaurant for a while. Suddenly the game makes sense: I see how I’ve been missing the mark. My adult ideas about what Alaska is—what creatures live in Alaska, how people actually get to Alaska, and what one might see out the window while traveling—are far outside the children’s real life experiences. My attempts to impose my own sense of realism missed the point. What’s important is going.

The going can be to anywhere, by any means. And it can be simultaneous. The ideas of one child don’t have to fit with those of another. Once the kids get there, wherever there is, the game is over. The excitement is rooted in the game’s action, its flexibility and the room it leaves for each child to fill in details with their own imagination. My attempts to play had stifled all of these. I’m surprised they’d kept inviting me back.

Not long after my revelation, Ellen sat on the floor of our mudroom pretending it was a car she was driving.

You sit here, she told me, patting the floor.

I sat.

We’re going in the car! she announced happily.

For the first time ever I did not ask what we were going to do, but responded:

We’re going in the car!

Ellen paused, looked at me carefully, then her face lit into a huge smile.

* * *

Ellen’s life ended in a car crash days after she’d graduated from high school. In that moment my world ended. I was left to continue on without her, trying to preserve the music, art and poetry she had created in her seventeen years, trying to not let her memory fade, to not let her disappear completely.

I had no guide for this. I was not raised in a religious tradition. My family is Jewish, but secular and intellectual, so I did not have faith in an almighty to anchor me to a hereafter, or a certainty that our physical separation is just a pause. My mother’s life was taken when I was thirteen, and I had held her memory close, writing to her in my journal when becoming a new mother myself, consulting her when facing difficult decisions, but still I had no firm belief in an afterlife. Despite craving these conversations, I often felt that I was playing pretend to comfort myself. And yet. The glimmer of possibility of something more remained and would not allow me to dismiss it completely.

When Ellen’s life ended, my need that our essences remain somehow connected beyond our physical beings, became acute. Though I could not believe she was flying around with a golden trumpet, I also could not ignore the slightly surreal moments that feel like visits. My intellect tells me wishful thinking. My heart says otherwise. My struggle between hope and reason an ongoing ebb and flow.

My therapist, an energy psychologist, suggests I might to try to speak with Ellen through him. Struggling to suspend my disbelief, I say yes. Glenn asks me to concentrate on Ellen’s voice in my mind, then he closes his eyes. I close mine as well. The room fills with the soothing sound of water trickling in the tabletop fountain.

Ellen wants you to know she loves you, Glenn says after a pause.

Everything falls away. She is there, smiling before me.

I love you too, honey! I miss you so much! There’s so much I want to tell you. Like, David ate with the cat fork—I didn’t have the heart to tell him. We would have laughed so hard!

Her smile shines even brighter. Then her face becomes serious.

Mom, I don’t want you to be sad.

I know, I whisper. I’ll keep trying.

Ellen fades from my mind’s eye. Glenn rematerializes in front of me.

If you picture Ellen’s love as light, what color do you see?

This I’m not expecting.

Purple, I answer without much thought. But then, No wait. Gold? Hold on.

I close my eyes again. The light divides itself, revealing an entire spectrum.

All colors, I reply slowly. Her love is all colors of light. I see the whole rainbow.

I carry this gift with me. It offers a beacon through the interminable darkness. Rainbows appear everywhere. Iridescent reflections in street signs, shimmering in drops of dew, dancing in the spray of a fountain, even painted rainbows on store signs, on a boat’s sail, or a whirligig spinning. Everywhere the colors of light: Iris dipping her pitcher into the river Styx, sprinkling it in the clouds, turning sorrow into beauty.

Whenever I reach the point of deepest despair, some sort of rainbow appears. I see sunbows, mistbows, moonbows. I wonder if they’ve been there all along, but only notice them now that I’m learning to pay attention. Each feels ethereal, like a link beyond time and through space. I want to believe this. It is difficult.

I have moments where it seems obvious: of course there is a dimension beyond this. How could this one lifetime be all there is? Where does this thing, this spirit, our essence, the spark called “Life” go? Where does it come from? Sometimes it seems clear that all our energy is connected and there must be another, or many, levels of being. But at other times that just seems like a comforting fantasy, a foolish fairy tale, and it’s really all completely random. So I continue to swing back and forth between skepticism and hope.

* * *

The sky is dark, the clouds swollen. I stand on the rock in the fields where Ellen and I often walked together, where our family held a ceremony to celebrate her life. The trees in the distance bend and sway in an undulating mourning dance. Finally I speak to the swirling sky.

Honey, Grandpa died this morning. I hope he wasn’t too scared. I hope he is with you. I hope there is more. I want this all to make sense.

Directly above me, the low cloak of clouds slides apart, not sideways like curtains, but the way a camera’s aperture spirals open, revealing a brilliant blue circle behind the veil that had obscured what had been there all along. A stream of blue light pours down on me. I stretch my arms to it, palms up, accepting the magic. The magic and the mystery. The blue beam moves around briefly, then the mantle of clouds slips closed.

There is a knowing that goes beyond what can be understood with the mind.

I have never been to Egypt or Mount Everest or Alaska or the Moon. That doesn’t make them not real. So my ability, or inability, to comprehend dimensions beyond this physical realm is irrelevant to whether or not they exist. A friend recently told me of seeing her dog playing happily—hours after having buried her. My friend concluded sheepishly: It felt like a visit, but maybe it was just my mind.

To my surprise, I heard myself respond: Your mind is just the conduit.

Years ago, another friend described connecting energetically with her newborn across the room. “I’d wake up, and if I put my consciousness at all in the direction of the baby, the milk would let down. And other times I’d hold myself separate, almost like a meditative state, and I could hold a little acupuncture on the energy thread. And then I could let it go. And then the milk would let down.”^[1]

If energy can bridge short distances, why shouldn’t it cross larger ones, like dimensional planes, like life and death, as well?

“Dying is the opposite of leaving,” poet Andrea Gibson offers in their Love Letter from the Afterlife. “When I left my body, I did not go away. That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here. … Why did no one tell us that to die is to be reincarnated in those we love while they are still alive?”^[2]

Every night I whisper to Ellen’s photo the bedtime mantra I said to her for years: May all the forces of the universe protect you. You are the love of my life. The girl of my dreams.

And I repeat to her the words she used to say to me: I love you infinity groups of infinity, never stops, goes forever and ever.

One night, new unbidden words and a flash of understanding come through me: May we always shine together, grounded in grace and gratitude.

Ellen’s eyes beam into mine. I hear her voice in my mind: Now you’re ready to go to Alaska!

---

^[1]  Rites of Passage: Mothers’ Stories of Giving Birth, Naomi Bindman, unpublished

^[2]  https://andreagibson.substack.com/p/love-letter-from-the-afterlife

Naomi Bindman’s poetry and prose has appeared in magazines, literary journals, anthologies, and on podcasts. They won Dogwood Journal’s Creative Nonfiction Award, and received funds from the Vermont Arts Council and Vermont Humanities Council. Naomi is on the faculty of the Vermont State Colleges. Her memoir, You’re the Words I Sing, the story of Naomi’s journey back to life performing the songs of her daughter Ellen, is currently on submission with major publishers, and a film based on the memoir is in active development with a leading Hollywood story development company.

And righteousness looks down from the sky

The three tropicbirds soar and wheel, wheeling to soar, 
wanting speed wanting height—always high, they circle like drones
to get a comprehensive island and lagoon view, which is why
we are here, at the highest point of Aitutaki, dear.

The tropic birds appear to be in orbit around the moon, transfigured,
feathers glowing, lower half of wing and pintail alight,
lit white reflected like moon a softer solar bright, flying below
it still the three appear to be circling in the blue above them a white, 
thin high clouds, a day moon.
                                                       Some tropicbirds are red-tailed—
Leo showed us three long deep red feathers he’d tucked in the visor
of the Black Pearl above the ship’s wheel, piloting us
around the huge quadrangle of a light aqua coraled sand lagoon
to Honeymoon Island—where we spotted a Hawksbill flying—
                   blurred beneath the waves—remember? 


Now it is time we leave this island—
May my love have such porous limits
bleeding over boundaries, through restrictions.
 

Dave Mehler lives in McMinnville, Oregon, and is a truckdriver for a landfill near Portland. He edits the online literary journal Triggerfish Critical Review. His full-length poetry collections are Roadworthy (2020) and Bad Is Bent Good (2025) both from Aubade Publishing. He is currently at work on a manuscript of love poems, Cloud Street.

Eventually


Joy will run through 
like ribbons of glue
and sun-caught gold leaf,
binding broken bits
of a kintsugi bowl.

A longtime New Englander, Marilyn MacArthur is a writer of poetry and creative nonfiction who works in human services and actually loves and respects humans. She has been a special education teacher and an activities director in long-term care, and is now a case manager for individuals with intellectual disabilities. A dog person who adores her cat, Marilyn is fascinated with archaeology and linguistics, loves Doctor Who and the Lord, and delights in musical comedies and Celtic rock.

to be still


If you stand perfectly still
in the grasses of the arid steppe,

the moon will appear
as a tiny white dot,
just a drop of pearl acrylic;

her glittering mountains
will become threads of
meandering streams;

lamplit cars along winding roads
will romance as ants, rolling
toward the unknown under
the blinker lights of the stars.

adobe homes of every town will fade
along the slimming edge of dusk before
they disappear. only the bumps and bruises
of mother earth will remain.

yet you will attend to her kindly in your stillest mind;
until it becomes a stream and the moon turned to glass.

then you’ll become the shine and glimmer
of a sycamore in the dark,
arcing like a river toward
the flesh and bone

of everything.

Greg Wood is a southern cosmopolitan poet with roots in Virginia and connections to Alabama and Amman, Jordan. He regularly publishes in Dissident Voice and recently was featured in Ireland’s Dodging the Rain and Britain’s The Lake. Greg is the founder of Skylight, a creative arts outreach program that has touched the lives of many across the United States.

Compass

In a dense forest, trees huddle,
sharing their lineage of light
and companionship,

in the company of things
rooted or in flight,
where everything knows its home.

Our footsteps merge
with fallen leaves—
a disappearance,
not the same as being lost.

Our compass needle nods,
while our pine-needle path 
weaves stanzas
into evergreen.

An invisible bird sings along,
with notes like breadcrumbs
marking the way

and we trust

that even roots unseen
somehow know the sky.

Marso writes poetry shaped by years of living in different cultures and by a practice of paying attention to ordinary life.

Orchard

Before I began to live in a borrowed house with its back to the ocean, I lived in the middle of another country, underneath the country of the borrowed house. “Underneath” as in the southern side of the border, so that visually it appears to be under the other country, at least on a two-dimensional surface such as a map.

At first there was no orchard where I lived in the middle of the other country, but we planted one, tree by tree. I call my husband Tree because he’s tall and not overly fond of hugging—you can run up and hug him and he’ll stand there, tall and strong with his arms at his sides, so you might feel like you’re hugging a tree. Everyone who knows how much life-force courses through a tree (sometimes you can hear it, with your ear pressed close to the bark) knows that this is not to suggest coldness or disinterest on the part of my tall, strong husband in the middle of the other country.

When we moved into the house nowhere near an ocean in the other country, the eleven acres were fallow. Of course that word reminds me of “hollow,” but the land is not hollow, although we later learned of an underground river running deep beneath it. The house sits right on the highway and has only seven windows and one bedroom. Because of the south-facing slope way behind the house and over a hill, we knew we could plant fruit trees. It’s basically a secret orchard because you can’t see it from the highway or even from the backyard.

My husband and I snuck up on the fallow, not hollow, land before we began to live there. After we first looked at the house and overgrown fields and pasture in the daytime, we drove back after midnight and parked on another road, one that borders the opposite end of the field. We made our way through the ditch and brambles alongside the dirt road, wary of being seen, which was most unlikely with no houses nearby and the roads empty. We crouched low, bent toward the earth as we climbed and stepped from the tree line to the edge of the field to see how it felt to stand there at night.

Was it because we were moving gingerly, low to the ground, that a charge came through it? Not into the soles of our feet since we weren’t barefoot, but more generally around us, gently pin-pricking into our lightly clad arms and legs? That is what happened that night in April as we walked and stood still by turns, and also at times lay down. You’d think we’d have lain on our backs to look up at the night sky, but instead we lay on our stomachs. When we had something to say, we propped ourselves up on our elbows and our words went into the ground and into the air. The witchgrass and foxtail were high.

 Even from the highest point in the field, the house was hidden from view. Only the barn was visible. It was years later, when the well pump broke, that the person who came to fix it told us of a river running deep underground. I wondered if the water coursing below us had to do with what Tree and I felt as we lay on the ground that night.

 When I had a miscarriage, that information, too, came up from the ground we were crawling on, and maybe also from the river underneath. By then, we had lived in the house for five years and were growing almost an acre of strawberries, the most sought-after in the area. We grew several varieties, all with their own names such as Earliglow, Jewel, and Sparkle. But they all have their general name, “strawberry,” because of the age-old necessity of having to be covered with straw until the nights are warm enough to let them be uncovered. The timing is tricky: you want them to get the full benefit of spring sunlight, but you don’t want to risk doing so while they’re still vulnerable to late frosts.

It was spring when I was about four weeks pregnant. We had taken the straw off the strawberry plants a week or two before the night of the late frost. But when the frost came, the only chance of saving the berries was to go out and cover them back up. We must have been hoping until the last possible moment for the weather to change, because by the time we went out to do it, it was pitch dark, windy and getting cold. As my husband drove the tractor, I stood on the trailer bed and used a pitchfork to toss bales of straw throughout the rows. We rode up and down the rows like that until all the bales were dispersed. Then the process of spreading straw over the plants began. Each time we cut the twine binding the bales, we used our pitchforks to take apart the bales and shake the straw loosely into piles beside the rows. It seems we could have stayed standing, using our pitchforks to scatter straw, and maybe that’s how my husband kept doing it, or maybe he joined me on the ground from the opposite end of the row or in the adjacent one. Either way, my own method was to crawl on all fours, using my hands to gather straw from between the rows and pile it in mounds on top of the berries. Of course, there are no berries at this point, but that’s how you refer to strawberry plants as soon as they’re planted.

At that early stage of fetal gestation, there is no detectable movement. One moment I was crawling along on my hands and knees, blanketing the berries with straw, and one moment I felt the slightest sense, infinitesimal really, of a current (of energy? of information?) coming up from the ground and into my body. What I discerned, without in a million years being able to explain how, was the absence of a separate life in my body. I suddenly knew I was no longer pregnant. Equally and at the same time, aliveness in the earth was palpable. The wind was blowing around us and it was getting colder, but we kept piling straw on the strawberry plants in the hope of saving them. There was no need to speak about what I knew to be the case at that moment. The next morning we made an appointment for an ultrasound.

 Logistical details that followed are less vivid to me than the instant of knowing, while crawling around in the night sky (the earth and sky being all together, in the dark), the fact of the change that had happened at some point in the previous three weeks: the cessation of the pregnancy, although nothing had been expelled from my uterus yet. That is a clunky sentence for an enigma I haven’t articulated until now, twenty-three years later. The ultrasound confirmed it: “There is no baby in here,” said the technician or doctor holding a kind of wand and looking at the screen, which resembled a static-beset, black-and-white television documentary of undersea waves. He told us about the frequency, even the normalcy, of early miscarriage: one in four pregnancies ends in the first four to six weeks, I think he said, often without the woman ever knowing she was pregnant.

From the beginning, which is never really a beginning in itself, I had not intended to stay in the borrowed house with its back to the ocean without receiving any visitors at all. People would periodically join me, I had thought—my sister, husband, friends—and I’d take them to the giant boulder I climb every few days in the shallow harbour. From the top of the boulder, I throw stones back into the ocean, stones I’ve picked up and carried into the house to live with for a while. Once a seal watched me stretching on top of the boulder, and I watched it back.

However, the year before I arrived, the border between the two countries closed for the first time in history. I was able to cross freely as a “dual citizen,” but no one else in my family was allowed except my sister, who stayed home, and our dad, who had died. Naturally, everyone thought the border would re-open by the following winter, but it did not. I am writing in the past tense now because it has already happened. I did not think I could not write in the past tense before, because the orchard is still there and a river may still be coursing, flowing, swirling, running, or perhaps just holding still beneath it.

Lisa Fishman is the author of eight books of poetry, a collection of short stories, and a forthcoming novel. Her most recent book is One Big Time (Wave Books, 2025); her debut novel, Write Back Now!, will be released on 1366 Books by Guernica Editions (Toronto) this May. Her book of stories, World Naked Bike Ride, was published in Nova Scotia by Gaspereau Press (2022) and shortlisted for a ReLit Award in Canada. Her work has appeared in Granta, Fairy Tale Review, jubliat, A Public Space and elsewhere. A dual US/Canadian, she divides her time between Eastern Canada and Wisconsin.

In Sky’s Chapel

There is a starkness in this February
sunset, evening prismed rosy orange—
a fiery mirage. The trees, leafless blades,
slice the entering night, looking for all
the world like candles in sky’s chapel
wanting to be lit—their sap a wick, patient 
for warmth this showy dusk merely foretells.
Only when winter’s final sigh rounds
to spring’s bursting O will sap, warmed
from dormered sleep, light buds in virid
greens. Tonight I raise both arms and ask
how many springs are left to spill 
from these my sunset’s outstretched hands.

Since beginning to write in 2008, Nancy Jentsch‘s work has appeared in journals such as Still: The Journal and Braided Way. In 2020, she received an Artist Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the resulting collection, Between the Rows, debuted in 2022 (Shanti Arts). Her current writing project involves reinvestigating genealogical information she unearthed in the pre-computer 1980s. She has retired after 37 years of teaching and finds a bounty of inspiration in her family and her rural home.

More Imagination Needed

We are surrounded
by God’s Creation,
the ocean we swim in.
The Southern Cliff in
the Lagoon nebula
is five light years tall.
Including the Oort cloud,
our solar system,
is two light years across.

The God I imagined
fits within that.
God filling the galaxy
stretches my imagination.
Imagining God filling
the known universe
is beyond me.

Jeffrey L. Taylor is a retired Software Engineer. Around 1990, poems started holding his sleep hostage. He has been published in The Perch, California Quarterly, Loud Coffee, Texas Poetry Calendar, and Texas Poetry Assignment.

The Woman of Purple
[Lydia], a dealer in purple cloth, who worshipped God, and the Lord opened her heart to hear…
Acts 16:14

It wasn’t only that the rock snails illuminated
the gardens with their slimy trails,
nor that they slugged through the night
in barely audible streams,
it was that they had within them
the glory of uncommon color—
as if they were reciting verses of praise
each evening.  Stars guarding
heaven come so close, that I can hear
their burning sparks and smell
the incense of wonder. Those snails!
With salt and morning dew, I dip
linen and wool, and let the day
deepen their countenance—
a cloudburst sunset, my heart bruising
my skin, tonight I hear the song of snails.

Ellen Jane Powers lives on the North Shore of Boston. Her life and career have taken many twists and turns, but she’s not strayed from pursuing Spirit. She spent 12 years on the editorial review board of a small literary journal from Maine. Her poems have appeared in a variety of journals and in two collections of poetry, Celestial Navigation (Cherry Grove) and Toward the Beloved (Finishing Line).