Amethyst Review

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.

Robin Greenfellow

An orchard welcomes him, devoid
of hoof-wearing duff. Weary

of hawkish airs, he treads the kempt
rows; analeptic blades

administer their balm. For now,
the fruit can wait – fescue receives

him well enough. He plays cutter,
wreathed in fresh clippings, and chips

dead bark for compost. But seasons
alter, churning turf to crud.

Branches sag with autumn’s heft,
overbearing their pulp. Crows

grow fat on dropped grapes as aphids
lay their vanitas. Laddered

above, Pomona persists: it cannot
all be saved, she says, gather

what you can.

Joseph Porter-Bolger is a poet and recording engineer based in Peterborough, UK.

Puruṣa

Puruṣa, the giant of heads
and eyes and feet – thousands of them –
extends his body everywhere.
Where he rises he is the sky
and where he is low he is the earth,
and in between there is a space
for the spread of a thousand hands.

The gods made him a sacrifice
and he allowed himself to be,
to be an offering and a fuel
where the seasons could rise and cook.
The fat that was burned and drained off
became village, forest and bird
and every possible offering:
poetry and meters and chants,
the horse and the cow, goats and sheep.
From his jeweled mouth the priests were born
and from his arms the soldiers came
and from his legs the nameless rest.
Moon and sun came from mind and eye,
storm and fire emerged from his mouth
and the wind from his controlled breath.

He allowed this of his body,
that it should be the world, and that
the gods should set it in order.
This was the first ritual law:
that sacrifice is a spiral
that should be sacrificed to the
first sacrifice, to Puruṣa.
When the gods sit on the sacred
grass this is what they do, sprinkling 
the one born at the beginning
with water flowing from himself.

Tim Miller’s latest book of poetry, Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, was just published by S4N Books. His poetry has appeared in Crannóg, Southword, The Brazen Head, Forgotten Ground Regained, and others across the US and UK. He is online at wordandsilence.com and can be heard on the poetry podcast Human Voices Wake Us.

Living On

Maybe the dead hear every thought,
see every memory we have of them
when they flutter up to the surface

of our minds the way a gentle dream
glimmers like passing headlights
on bedroom walls. When we say
their names, enunciated carefully

into the night of their swims, it’s like
someone sitting on the edge of a sleeper’s
bed. When we’re driving through

the gravel spackle of rainwater
to some nowhere place and we squint
against the gray light and see instead
them, in the routine of their living,

their crooked drawls, the chigger cling
of their repeated phrases, the stilt
in their gait, the coin clatter of their cracking knuckles,

is it like the wingsong drive-in projector
painting movement on the canvas screen,
the sound so muffled and distant
like department store radio? Tonight,

through the clouded midnight of her rest
like a silent blinking plane, the short film
of herself, standing on that emerald carpet

in her living room, me at her knee,
looking out of the big front windows
and reading the storm clouds like sheet music
and singing them to me, glass slits

in her glasses, country music videos
on her TV. Then it’s gone into shadows
like a voice diffusing into a cave.

Devon Neal (he/him) is a Kentucky-based poet whose work has appeared in many publications, including HAD, Stanchion, Stone Circle Review, Livina Press, and The Storms, and has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. He currently lives in Bardstown, KY with his wife and three children.

Theophany

Like—
Ceiling fans set to high,
Stirring spectral streamers
Or
Searchlights on aluminum trees,
Calling to a round-headed kid….
Or
Charged Earth-pelting particles,
Delighting science teachers.

No.

I can hear Coleridge laugh,
As he did for the man who hurled loose adjectives
At the magnificent, beautiful, sublime waterfall.
I, too, am a spectator made small by the wonder
Trying to domesticate its vastness.
Prone always to say moon is like lantern
Rather than lantern is like moon.

This field, dark and open,
Seems a perfect dome,
So like a planetarium.

I curse these images and myself
For not having a mind fit
To welcome this magnificence,
Aurora, rare visitor to our southern night,

Closest streetlight ten cedared acres away,
But I find, I am the city.
City piled upon city,
Ever increasing weight,
Crushing down to a singularity
So powerful it can pull any cosmic vision
Down to earth.

Perhaps some Keetoowah wanderer,
Finding himself far from the river,
Happened upon this place
On another night of storms in heaven.
The curling shape of Uktena
Warning him that he had strayed
Too far from a world meant for people.
But he would have seen the alien,
Truly seen it.
Turning away in body—yes,
But spirit reaching up to meet the serpent,
A moment to shade and shape all his days.
I envy the gift given to that warrior:
To see a sky he did not believe he owned.

McGregor Cook is a speech coach and voice actor living in Fountain Inn, SC.

Visitation

“I’m not a religious person. I don’t believe in things like that. But there is no other explanation than that my mother was with me.”

--Nick Chirls

We lived in the same town
but I didn’t know Catherine Chirls.
I knew what she looked like
because of her missing-person photo
taped to the door
of our local supermarket,
its backlit transparency haunting
me because I recognized
I’d seen her there
in more solid form many times.
Fast-forward to her memorial service
from which any sign
of her body’s missing
because it was vaporized
when the North Tower went down.
Her sixteen-year-old son
is giving the eulogy
before family and friends 
who hold their breath
when a sparrow lands
like a tiny jet
on the top of Nick’s head
as he says the word mother.
He stops speaking to take it
in his hand and free it.

Richard Thomas Murray’s poems have appeared in The Dark Horse, The Seventh Quarry, The Moth, The Main Street Rag, Poetry East, Slipstream, The Bitter Oleander, Rattle, Santa Fe Literary Review, and additional journals. His first book of poems, Edisonia, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2022. He has taught creative writing to high school students at the United Nations International School in New York City and currently teaches undergraduates at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He promoted awareness of New Jersey’s Native American nations as a director of the New Jersey Folk Festival. For more information: richardthomasmurray.com.

Memento Mori (The Abbey Cemetery)

Some cemeteries advertise a view:
The dead “look out” upon a trim expanse
Of hedgerows and, appropriately, yews,
Morbidity thus tempered by romance.

But poorer dead (or dead with common sense)
Suffice with rest eternal here and there
(My grandmother: right near the cyclone fence
Along a busy city thoroughfare).

These monks though poor are rich with wooded hills
And skies so broad and blue as to recall
The soul to something infinitely still
And beautiful: the Holy All in All.

And as I grave by grave the tombstone math
Place side by side with my biography,
I pray I might walk my remaining path
With greater faith, with grace, with ardency.

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, Amethyst Review, America Magazine, 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.

Sparrow On Lilac Branch

Way
transcendental-immanence
pleasure-of-moment
sacred-sight
living-universe-breath
mountain landscape
rivers flow
stones tumble
shining as the creatures
everything-in-touch 
existing-as-one
like the hands
that shovel winter snow                                                                             
that turn spring compost                                                                           
that plant garden seeds
that hold the silent teacup
pleasantly attached
to the easy breath
   -- sparrow on lilac branch

Robert Daniel Smith: Former Soup Kitchen Cook / Poet. Now just a Poet in Wisconsin cultivating Tao.

Ecology of Majesty

I think I will find my way back into silence
into the slant of dark that knew me
before the names of things were born
before the tongues of societies curled into madness
separation division of this from that of one from another
desecration of the flower of the wholeness of the song
a harmony arising from the voices in the field
in the woods and from the richness of the soil
where the seed believes in light all life a singular
intention the expression of one truth the way
the mountain laurel blooms where bunting sweetly trills
from depths of sea to reach of sky oh spinning Earth
in sea of stars on one great easy breath of love
I close my eyes and find my way through slant of dark
where all is One and I remember why I came.

Alfred Fournier is a writer and community volunteer in Phoenix, Arizona. His poems and creative nonfiction have appeared in The Indianapolis Review, Gyroscope Review, The Sunlight Press, Delmarva Review, New Flash Fiction Review and elsewhere. Poetry publications include A Summons on the Wind (2023, Kelsay Books) and King of Beers (2025, Rinky Dink Press). He lives in the foothills of South Mountain with his wife and daughter and two birdwatching cats.