Amethyst Review

Under Pines

Diesel trucks stacked with raw 
bark-stripped logs rumble over 
cracked asphalt roads to the 
paper mill. The flatbeds stir 
cyclones of dust where I walk 
on road-side sand left from 
winter. Monster engines blow 
back my hair, scorch my bones.
I duck into cool woods.

No path opens, but pines stand apart,
offering a way carpeted with needles.
An easy wind brushes the glade,
ruffling fragrant branches.
The boughs are like manes 
on a herd of horses. They arc
and bounce in a canter.

Overhead, a jay squawks
into cathedral silence,
swoops and lands.
Feathers quiver,
gyrating from inside 
layers of blue and white.

Water finds its way 
into this damp darkness,
under mossy boulders
through a pebble-strewn 
ravine. Beams of splintered 
sun slant across the brook, 
molten silver.

Ahead a single purple bloom
spills a secret from between 
heart-shaped leaves.

From this glade unfolds the whole
of creation light and dark with
life flowing until the last.

Christine Jackson is retired from her day job, three decades of teaching literature and creative writing at a South Florida university. She continues to clock in on a life-long night shift writing poetry. Her work has been published in an array of online journals, including Shot Glass Journal, Ekphrastic Review, Verse-Virtual, South Florida Poetry Journal, and New Verse News.

Incense

The spoon I'd dumped
in the bowl of murky water
slips into my mind—
cold and forgotten.

Having scooped my cravings,
it remains unwashed.
I think of all the unclean things
I've kept stashed away in the cupboard.

In the kitchen,
the black kettle stands simmering,
exuding a faint metallic scent.

Incense spills through the room.
I think of the tabernacle—
my bottled prayers.

The steam rolls and billows.

Vernon Mukumbi is a Medical Doctor based in Zambia, Africa. His poetry has previously appeared in the Apple Valley Review.

When All Else Fails, There Is Something


that will bring you light. 

It may seem obvious; 
well, it is obvious—the purple and green
cabbages the neighbor planted to survive the cold. 

The purple and green cabbages they planted
because nothing else can withstand 
the freezing rain. 

When you’re full of angst, when you’re 
standing at what looks like the edge
of disaster, stare out 
into the freezing rain— 

see if you can see the purple and green. 

And if you can’t, or

are somehow reading this, instead,
which indeed you are: 

They’re alive!, 
the purple and green cabbages, 

somewhere out in the icy cold—

Ahrend Torrey is the author of Running Among the Trees—New & Selected Poems (2026). His works often explore the connection between humanity and the natural world, themes of LGBTQ+ identity, hope, and the global climate crisis. He is a recipient of the Etruscan Prize awarded by Etruscan Press, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize multiple times. His individual poems have appeared in journals such as the Denver Quarterly; Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature; storySouth; The Greensboro Review; and West Trade Review, among others.

What Does It Mean to Surrender?

Even the tall poplars surrender
to harsh winds in a night storm,
bowing, breaking. Think of the wind,
seen only when countered
by something other.

Once a tree crashed through
the cathedral ceiling of my bedroom
where I long ago tried to surrender
to the demise of my marriage.
That squall blew me down so far
my forehead scraped
the rough stones of loss beneath me.
At times, I could not breathe.
But even then my tears were holy.

The Persian poet Hafez says
we are playing
a chess game with God
whose magnificent moves
can make a saint
bow down in joy.

We fool ourselves,
the Poet says, if we think we can
outmaneuver the Grand Master.
Each time I cried, I descended a stone stair.
At the bottom, there were stone steps
on all four sides of me,
and a dark pond, fragrant with salt and memory.

Donna Baier Stein is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, poet, and playwright. She is the recipient of the PEN/New England Discovery Award, Foreword Reviews Award, Bread Loaf Scholarship, Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars Fellowship, Iowa Fiction Award Finalist, and more. My work has been featured on NPR, PBS, Washingtonian, Saturday Evening Post, and O Magazine.

John the B and Me

I’ve had in my own way my desert days,
Though never ate
A locust, never held a crowd enrapt
By pointing out to them how trapped,
How reprobate,
How lost they were, adrift in sinful ways.

Yet from that place where I in comfort dwelt 
I could not see
Beyond the limited parameters
Of my own will nor know the grace that stirs
Up fervency,
And desert nonetheless that surely felt.

My prophecy is one of self-reproach:
I’d somehow lost
The knack to see Him in the crowd and could
Not realize His nearness till I stood
Before His cross
Yet somehow had not noted His approach.

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.

Gargoyles
 
They all are far more solid than we are,
the gargoyles on the grand cathedrals. Stone
lasts long. When we are piles of ash or bone,
the gargoyles’ eyes, although they don’t see far,
will still behold a town, a shooting star,
their ears will tremble to a mourner’s groan,
their shoulders shrug from which a falcon’s flown,
their tongues curl insect-like from jaws ajar.
Some people think all things are conscious, no
exceptions. We don’t know what gargoyles think,
but I suppose, perhaps, of us. That might
explain their grins and grimaces, their wink,
which takes them years, their gap-toothed overflow
of rain through lips that part with shrewd delight.

Dan Campion is the author of Calypso (1981), A Playbill for Sunset (2022), The Mirror Test (2024), Star Anchors (2026) and Peter De Vries and Surrealism (1995) and is a co-editor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (1981, 2nd ed. 1998, 3rd ed. 2019). Dan’s poetry has appeared previously in Amethyst Review and in Able Muse, Light, Poetry, Rolling Stone, THINK, and many other magazines.

Naming

Once, I didn’t know the names of birds.
Their voices dropped
(welcome but unaccountable) from trees
likewise un-christened.
And a slant light glistened,
and I, to seize
the living moment, stopped –
but it had passed already beyond words.

Once, I didn’t know the names of flowers.
They always caught
me by surprise, pushing their starry noses
through gravel dust
with an unreasonable trust.
Of course I knew the roses
but not that twinkle in the parking lot,
anonymous among the weeds and burrs.

But “tanager,” you said, and “violet,”
“nuthatch” and “aster,”
pointing to the cones
of Douglas firs. So now I see
fixed patterns in the bark of every tree.
Even the great blue herons
accept their name – oh blessing or disaster
that made astonishment articulate.

Hilary Biehl’s poems have appeared in Blue Unicorn, Able Muse, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. Her poetry collection, Giants Crossing (Kelsay Books, 2025) received the Poetry by the Sea Book Award. She lives in New Mexico.

The World Above
		
we came across
a wooden handmade six-step ladder

designed on a pine crate-box
along a dusty red dirt road 

in the Verde Valley
fields of barley swayed, both sides	
	
a symphony of grain rustling, 
a whispering in the breeze

climbing, standing at the top,
gazing at the clouds

how I wish
I could have heard your voice sooner,

now, who created this moment
beneath twilight,

as the Gambel’s quail ran by?

Mary L. Serantoni is a poet based in Arizona, originally from Chicago, Illinois. Her work appears in Poets for Science, Farraday Newsome: Memento Vitae, My Body Is Your Nest for Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum exhibition, Museum of Northern Arizona’s PoetryMaps exhibitions (2024, 2025), Amethyst Review (UK), Blue Heron Review (Spring 2026), Syncopation
Literary Journal, CAN (Vol.5, Issue 2) and forthcoming in Zephyr Haiku – 
Winter Issue. She holds a BA from Chicago’s DePaul University, and is a 
member of a local Poetry Workshop through a local nonprofit. @serantonimary

Ecdysis

When I have shed my skin and left behind 
a pale and translucent memory of myself, 
will you find it, coiled upon coil 
in a great long moebius band? 

But if you try to pick it up, to feel 
the texture, running through your hands,
to hold it as you once held me, the memories 
will crumble into a litter of dust and scale. 

But somewhere, somewhere, I will be 
dancing my glittering dance, 
singing my sinuous song, 
waiting for you to shed your skin 
and dance with me.

Edward Alport is a retired teacher and proud Essex Boy. Currently he is a poet, writer and gardener. He has had poetry, articles and stories published various webzines and magazines and performed on BBC Radio and Edinburgh Fringe. His Bluesky handle is @crossmouse.bsky.social. His website is crossmouse.wordpress.com.

Eschaton

These summer evenings of low clouds and heat,
The lake goes milky in the last minutes before sunset,
Light clinging to the waves as the Earth darkens.
If other worlds are coming, Lord, bring them slowly..

James Owens‘s newest book is Family Portrait with Scythe (Bottom Dog Press, 2020). His poems and translations appear widely in literary journals, including recent or upcoming publications in Christianity & Literature, Relief, and The Windhover. He earned an MFA at the University of Alabama and lives in a small town in northern Ontario, Canada. He sometimes teaches writing at Laurentian University.