Amethyst Review

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.

Protect Us From All Anxiety        
                      	                         				
A wind gust slips into our house
pushing open the living room door.
Shadows of branches and powerlines
bounce upon the sunlit wall,
and though I’m alone
and afterlife has become make-believe,
the guardian angel of my childhood
appears through the window
and sits by my side again
                                               

Tim Dwyer’s debut poetry collection, Accepting The Call (templarpoetry.com), has won the Straid Collection Award. His Japanese form and longer poetry appears regularly in Irish, UK and international journals and anthologies. Raised by Irish immigrant parents in Brooklyn, since 2019 he has lived in Bangor, Northern Ireland. He was a psychologist in New York State prisons. He is a previous contributor to Amethyst Review.

Finding the Luminous in a Safe Deposit Box

King David wrote in Psalms (147:4): “He counts the numbers of the stars; He gives a name to each of them.” 

A torn piece of yellowed paper with a pink border, and English and Hebrew lettering, It bears signatures from my parents and Rabbi Barras, and the stamp of Temple Israel. For all the years I’ve had this document — at least 35 — it’s been in a safe deposit box inventoried as a birth certificate. Along with other miscellanea that people put in those boxes like jewelry appraisals, car titles, deeds etc. Oh yes, and old passports and mom’s jewelry.

Yesterday, my husband emptied the box to prepare for our bank branch closing. “Take a look at this stuff and let me know if it needs to be in a vault or not,” he remarked.  I did and realized that the paper with the pink border wasn’t a birth certificate. It was a precious piece of family history — my naming certificate given to my parents after a ritual marking my entrance into Jewish life.

It wasn’t imposing enough to imprint on my brain earlier, but now that my sister, Ina, and I are getting up in years, and our family’s health has diminished instead of flourished, it is part of a time capsule linking me to my Jewishness. The naming ceremony places me in the particular Jewish community of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania’s Temple Israel on South River Street, right next to the Victorian building where we lived for 20 years. (My father was a conveniently located minyan member if the count needed of ten men ran short.) When a Jewish baby girl is named in the synagogue, the first blessing is for the mother’s health, and the second is that the baby will grow to be a wise and understanding Jewish woman of goodness and greatness. 

The ceremony was probably the first at this new temple centered on one of my parents’ occasions. I know that my mom must have been dressed in her almost-Dior suit, sewed by my grandfather after he came home from work as a Dior tailor. Her appearance was critical to her since going to Temple Israel was torturous for her. A newcomer to this old community, she never felt that she fit in with the other women. The wives of the community, who populated the Temple Sisterhood, the local Hadassah chapter, and the county club, would look her up and down as she walked into the sanctuary. It didn’t make a difference that they assessed anybody new who came down the aisle – she was too insecure and shy to dismiss their appraisal. 

Ma was a former piano teacher married to a psychologist in a community where their generation of Jews owned factories or shops — just one or two generations up from the peddlers who came from Ellis Island. Temple Israel was comprised of businesspeople who had been left their businesses by relatives. Often the original store or factory was a small retail shop or even a peddler’s wagon. My parents’ generation had made good on their inheritance by expanding sales outside of the area and marketing outside of the Jewish community. The other professionals — the doctors, lawyers, and accountants – were cliquish since they were mostly the sons and daughters of the town’s earliest Jewish settlers who had the means to send them to university. Ma was acutely aware that my father’s income wasn’t enough to buy their way into the temple hierarchy or clubs. In addition, since my father was the only therapist in town, he knew all the town’s secrets and private suffering. He, and my mom, were kept at arm’s length. 

 Unlike me, my sisters weren’t born in Wilkes-Barre. The family moved there once my father completed his Ph.D., a Veteran’s Administration (VA) internship, and was offered a job at the local Northeast Pennsylvania VA hospital. My parents were thrilled to be sent to a community only a few hours from their New York and New Jersey families, and one that boasted a large Jewish community. How were they to know that it would be like an exile for them both, particularly my mother?

On that day at the end of May 1956, in Temple Israel, I officially became Miriam Rachel, a name that honored two deceased great aunts. In Hebrew it had several derogatory translations — rebel, bitter — showing the unease the patriarchs felt about Miriam’s scandalous behavior in the desert. The Bible asserts she organized dancing and other worship of a golden calf when her brother, Moses, went off to get the Ten Commandments. The patriarchs remind us that she was stricken with leprosy for this transgression.  Other Hebrew translations of my name, however, include more positive definitions: wished for child, star of the sea, and beautiful. That wasn’t the preferred take in my family. My sisters would tell me frequently that when they found out the newborn wasn’t a boy, they told my parents to give me back. As my life unfolded, the rebel appellation seemed fitting. Bitter — not really, sad, maybe; rebel, yes.

I liked my name, except for the fact that no one where I lived had ever heard of it. This led to all kinds of uncomfortable interactions, beginning when I arrived in my first-grade class. Teachers called me Mimi, Marion, or Mary Ann. My mother had to intervene when one of the grade school teachers insisted on calling me Mimi despite my letting her know that it wasn’t my name. Ma called the teacher, irate, telling her that my name was Miriam and that she was not to call me Mimi. That worked and I have never warmed up to that nickname. Through the school years, I got used to spelling my name for my teachers, and mostly accepting it when people called me Mary Ann. 

 By the time I got to college I “found” my people and stopped having trouble with my name being misspelled and mispronounced. I cruised through life with fewer corrections needed on critical documents or butchered introductions. That is, until I moved to the southern states in my late fifties.

In the South is where it got bad again, and so finding my Jewish naming certificate was so comforting for me. Everywhere I went — especially in my workplaces — my name was mispronounced and the spelling became even more creative than up north. I worked in health care settings as a psychotherapist and people needed to know my name. Patients would be told variations of my name that I couldn’t even spell. I started to wonder if I had a speech impediment, which could explain why my new bosses and colleagues introduced me with these odd appellations. I tested that theory with family and was told I was nuts and taking it too personally. “No, you haven’t developed a speech issue with old age. People are just ignorant,” Ina “reassured” me. That proved to be true. It wasn’t just the sound of my name — it was the entire package. Pale, red-headed northerner in mostly black and grey fancy clothes who didn’t celebrate Christmas. Yep, the Jewish piece. For most of the people I met, especially at work, I was the first Jew they had ever encountered. I heard antisemitic slurs that I hadn’t heard since high school. When I complained to our billing person that her billing numbers, recorded in our official medical record, didn’t correspond with my tally, she responded: “I’m not trying to Jew you.” When I complained about her comment, I was investigated for having a racist attitude by questioning her work. HR informed me that I should be more careful about telling someone that their work was wrong, even though her numbers were wrong and resulted in shorting my fees. When they concluded that she would not also be reprimanded, I felt humiliated and deep in my brain surfaced another incident where I was embarrassed because of my Jewishness. Post-traumatic stress (PTSD) had been triggered.

I flashed back to a day in adolescence that I hadn’t thought about in 45 years. All those years later, I reexperienced a day in the high school cafeteria when a boy in my senior class threw a pocketful of change at me and exclaimed, “Pick it up kike.” What I can’t remember is how I responded — I was cheeky enough, like my namesake, Miriam, to imagine I told him to ‘fuck off’, but I don’t think that’s what I did. I think I ran out of the room, distraught with shame, so intense only a teenager could experience it. I was shocked. Never had I encountered anything like this from a peer. Someone who actually knew my name felt the need to single me out for embarrassment.  I don’t, however, remember the aftermath; it’s as if my brain froze as the coins hit the linoleum and his words : pierced the air. I can clearly see where he was in the room and where I was. The room was packed. Experts say when you experience trauma the brain erases the memory through a biochemical reaction. For me, all that came back was the event – the rest is lost in PTSD. 

Unlike now, there was no social media to support me and no well-meaning club to put on a diversity event to undo the incident. I cannot remember if he got into trouble, if I cried, if friends tried to make me feel better, if my parents even knew. It was the worst of the anti-Jewish incidents I experienced in my school years, but certainly not the only one.

 Mr. Boyle, my eighth-grade science teacher, intentionally scheduled exams on the High Holidays when the five Jews in the school (all in my grade) would be in synagogue instead of school. Did he identify us by our Jewish-sounding names. In a school full of Italian and Polish kids both our first and last names stood out, I’m sure. When challenged on the schedule, first by the students and then by our parents, he became belligerent and refused to change his mind. Again, I still feel the anger and outrage, but I don’t remember the result. I’m sure that if he gave the tests, there were no consequences for us or him.  We weren’t transferred to another teacher and, since the holidays are at the beginning of the year, the five of us suffered through the year with him. I can still see him — tall, thin, white haired and almost spitting with anger when he found out we had told our parents. The spittle of an old man’s outrage marks the visual I have of the incident. 

All of this comes back to me when I hold that pink-bordered piece of paper. My Jewish self, buried by the acts of others, now rises to comfort me from the page. The Hebrew letters of my parents’ names dominate the sheet; their English names recede. A deeper, ancient calendar, belonging to my people, notes my entry into life. I have too often in the last few years been alerted to the yahrzeit of my beloveds by these lunar-based dates. I convert the Hebrew months and days to the calendar I must use in this life, so I can honor their memories every year on the anniversary of their deaths. Otherwise, I rarely think of that link of my soul to the moon’s cycles, which the Jewish calendar marks.

This year I am lucky: I’ve unearthed a document heralding my entry into Judaism, that,  hopefully was, hopefully, a kind of rebirth of joy for my parents.  I say a silent prayer as I study the paper: “May I discover many more of these sacred pages as my one good life endures.”

Miriam Krasno is a retired social worker/psychotherapist. Currently working on a book of creative nonfiction about intergenerational transmission of trauma. Her poem, “Separation”, was published in the anthology, Her Soul Beneath the Bone, University of Illinois Press. Her essay, “The Joke People” was published in the Winter 2024 issue of River and South Review and her poems, “Runs in the Family” and “Why Brides Wear Blue” appeared in the Spring, 2024 issue of HerWords. Mud Season Review chose her poem, “When the Strat A Stat Ride Broke Loose” for inclusion in their section ‘The Take’ in Fall of 2024.

Grain of God

In memory of my brother.

I adored him, as a very little girl,
my big and princely brother, a runner,
and long of leg and arm and hand; a sailor 
with a sailor’s shoulder-span,
stronger than God. 

When I was five he told me:
Nice little girls don’t say damnit.  
A blow, for then, perplexed, I had to cram it back 
into my throat, this satisfying word—
I’d merely copied him.  

I was ten when he confided
he’d discovered maths to prove that God 
existed—a path of spirit and of stardom—a race track
not too long for him 
to run and win.  

Soon his sun would shine 
on all the sleeping world: his dreams 
of God were beams from God, he said.  His mind—
I saw it delve and rocket,
sail and run.  

Years would pass 
before I’d really know 
the unkind truth that he was mortal, 
that his maths of God 
were flawed.

Old, without the fame 
he had foretold, he’s died now,
finally caught by God like a kite that’s caught 
on a steeple by its string, 
bucking, wild

as an enigma 
no one can bear. 
And all his written works were like so many logs
adrift on choppy seas.  And yet, 
I gained, 

I gained in him
a grain of God, more sublime 
than all blue holes combined, honeyed as a heartbeat, 
and spirited,
as silence.

Johanna Caton, O.S.B, is a Benedictine nun of Minster Abbey, in Kent, England. Her poems have appeared in The Christian Century, St Austin Review, Ekphrastic Review, Amethyst Review, One Art, Today’s American Catholic, Fathom, Fare Forward, Windhover, The Catholic Poetry Room, and other publications. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee.