Amethyst Review

A Small Ask

Forgotten, no longer needed, dear St. Christopher,
if I call on you, will you be created, or will I be redirected,
some other close-enough-but-not-exact selected
by some heavenly process to sub in as listener?

If you’re not able to hear me, upon whom shall I call?
My book of holy saints is large, so I have a full docket:
modern Carlo Acutis to ancient Zechariah the Prophet.
I don’t want to bother, it’s nothing major, in fact it’s rather small.

Look, I’m being silly. If people called on Saint Guinefort
then I can call on you and I trust someone will listen:
I’m scared, please keep my mother in remission,
I’m getting really worried about my aunt’s cognition,
and I’m travelling home. So please help, St. Christopher.

Steven Soebbing is a poet who lives on a farm near Quincy, Illinois. His work explores queer desire, faith, inheritance, and the uneasy relationship between belief and authority.

Prayers Like Incense

They rise from bedsides, churches, sinking ships,
prayers like smoke, in columns intertwined,
rising from human hearts and human lips
into the cosmos, where some distant mind

perhaps is listening to our desperate pleas.
How many million voices every day
cry out for help?  And I’m just one of these.
So on behalf of all of us, I pray,

let one be answered. Let one miracle
occur.  It doesn’t have to be for me.
Let me believe that one cup will be full
of answered prayer today, one person be

relieved and grateful.  Let there be tonight
one voice that rose like incense in God’s sight.

Gail White is a formalist poet, contributing editor to Light Poetry Magazine, cat lover, long-time resident of South Louisiana. Laissez les bon temps rouler!

Confession 

Kneeling, standing, half-distracted
We repent of the evil done on our behalf
Wars waged, boats bombed, bodies broken
The sacred scarred.

We repent of the evil done on our behalf
Naming sins against body, nation, land
The sacred scarred,
Our lives built blindly on others’ pain.

Naming sins against body, nation, land
Turning toward, turning away
Our lives built blindly on others’ pain
Weakly called to mind, then disavowed.  

Turning toward, turning away
Wars waged, boats bombed, bodies broken
Weekly called to mind, then disavowed
Kneeling, standing, half-distracted.

Erin Lockwood is a writer, mother, Episcopalian, and political science professor who lives in southern California. Her poetry has appeared or will appear in Union Spring Literary Review, Red Door Magazine, Unbroken, and The Listening Eye.

Raptor
In memoriam, Jack Driscoll

The hawk’s cry is the wide eye of God, keen
              and keening toward the dark field where I hide
                            with my cherished shame. The things I do must hurt
the earth. Aloft, those ghost-honed eyes have seen
              my name writ large upon the land, the wide
                            swath of my going, its residue of hate.

Field-walking, I found a feather and believed
              it hawk-fallen. In faith, I fletched a shaft to drive
                            a broadhead through my enemy’s heart.
But at full draw I knew I’d been deceived
              about the nature of release. The feathers
                            were small kisses on my cheek.

Joshua McKinney’s fifth and most recent book of poetry, Sad Animal (2024), was the recipient of the inaugural John Ridland Poetry Prize from Gunpowder Press. His work has appeared in such journals as Boulevard, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, New American Writing, and many others. His other awards include The Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize, The Dickinson Prize, The Pavement Saw Chapbook Prize, and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing. He is co-editor of the online ecopoetics zine, Clade Song.

Words


In the beginning was the word,
was sky and stars along the void
like notes upon the scale.
The word was voice upon the air
that spoke the turning world.

In a mortal circle, scythe and blade
we plant and work the seed.
The spirit runs
through webs we touch:
filaments of your nerve to mine.

In gestures, love
we learn to speak
each radiant, varied as a word
joined in a phrase, seeking space,
the word becomes a world.

Robert McParland is the author of the novels The Last Alchemist and Shamrock and the non-fiction studies Beyond Gatsby: How Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Writers of the 1920s Shaped America, From Native Son to King’s Men: The Literary Landscape of the 1940s and The People We Meet in Stories.

Tour Guide at the Frauenkirche 

The Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady) in Dresden, Germany, built in 1726-43, was destroyed during World War II.

	for Sabine 


She’d lived here since this church was rubble, burned
in Dresden’s firestorm. When the bombs had turned
her city into ashes and debris,
the ruins of the church, essentially  
untouched, remained for decades: monument
to those who’d died and somber testament
to pain that spanned the country. But the scar
that split the nation, and extended far
beyond its borders, finally began
to heal—and Dresden had its own bold plan:
the Frauenkirche would stand here again,
to grace this square just as it had back when
no bombs had fallen. Thousands of the stones
from the demolished church would be the bones
that shaped a replica. Inside, a charred
and twisted cross, too precious to discard,
would flank the rebuilt altar. Our guide beamed,
still moved by how her city had redeemed
its past and honored it. They’d resurrected
its beauty brick by brick, and so rejected
the war’s brutality. The massive dome
again had risen, emblem of her home.

I stood before the church alone, hours past
the ending of a tour that had recast
the history I’d vaguely known. Our guide
had added detail, passion, joy, and pride.
I watched as late sun kissed the sandstone walls,
and thought about what rises and what falls,
what finally endures. This light would fade,
but not our guide’s tale of a church remade.
Her Frauenkirche stands with dignity
to honor peace and its fragility.

Jean L. Kreiling lives on the coast of Massachusetts. She is the author of four collections of poetry; her fifth is due out later this year from Able Muse Press. Her work has been awarded the Frost Farm Prize, the Rhina Espaillat Poetry Prize, the Kim Bridgford Memorial Sonnet Prize, and three New England Poetry Club prizes, among other honors.

The Alchemist Dilemma 

In my darkest hour
Love set a table 

When it was too dark
Love sent a light

There is no limit to my Table
Love said no limit to my Light

I thought the stars were saying
Something about a holy birth

It was love's light talking
About the birth of beauty

In the dark halls of my life
Where there had been no room

Love set a table
And sent a light

And love invited me in

Gerry Grubbs has had poems appear in the Painted Bride Quarterly, Journal Of Expressive Writing and others. His most recent book is Learning A New Way To Listen, from Dos Madre Press.

Angels in the Room

He wasn’t expecting us to be there—
sitting, still—next to the discolored body 

of our father. This, from the look of surprise 
on the undertaker’s face as he pushed open the door 

to our father’s room with the hurry of a doctor 
running late. He stood there, transfixed, 

trying to take us in. The three of us—
my sister, my brother, and me—gathered 

around our father’s bed like a trinity 
of angels, weeping. Transfixed, all of us. 

It must have been a busy night of deaths. 
And now—suddenly—he was there, 

in a room with the living. No one spoke. 
And then my sister said: You’re here for our father. 

Or maybe the three of us said it together—
all at once—like in that story from John 

when the angels say to Mary: Why are you weeping? 
As if they were one voice, one mind. 

Had we become—briefly—like angels? 
Or maybe no one spoke. Maybe the words 

just happened, like a body materializing 
inside a room. A room we left eventually, 

walked out of, away from our father’s body. 
And the undertaker placed our father’s body 

inside a long, zippered bag—a bag 
which happened to be the same shade 

of maroon as our father’s alma mater. 
My brother had noticed this—and we laughed, 

we did laugh, joyfully, as we walked out 
of that darkening room into the brightly lit corridor, 

squinting. Like Lazarus must have. 
Our eyes, taking in the light.

Lisa Dordal is a Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee and is the author of Mosaic of the Dark, a finalist for the 2019 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry; Water Lessons, a Lambda Literary most-anticipated-book for 2022; and Next Time You Come Home, a Lambda Literary most-anticipated-book for 2023. Her poetry has appeared in The Sun, Narrative, Image, Christian Century, Best New Poets, CALYX, and Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry.

Indwelling

I asked you to live in my heart,
not knowing what that meant.

Every continent has its species and subspecies.
Don’t wade into rivers past your hips.
Eat this meat, not that.

Worms. Vampire butterflies.

Later, when I’ve returned home,
lifting my daughter over my head
or bending to pick up a shoe,
I see exploding points of light.

The doctor tells me something’s been chewing
on my ventricles.

Or are you a room of gold?
Constructed in the wilderness,
veiled from the multitude,
moved from century to century,
shrouded in smoke and sacrifice,
attended by priests in a country
no longer on a map.

I’m occupied now.
Either way, surrounded.

James Fleet Underwood grew up in Madison Heights, Michigan, and now lives and teaches in rural Thailand. His work has appeared in Does It Have Pockets?, Pity Party Press, Horror Sleaze Trash, and Porch Lit. His first collection, Home Before the Dogs Come Out, is out from Alien Buddha Press in December.