Amethyst Review

Questions 

Spiral after spiral, the spider keeps time
as she spins her sticky section of the web.
Web-time expands until her trap
becomes a DNA magnet that captures
airborne material from other creatures.

Breath after breath, stitch after stitch,
the seamstress keeps time with her needle
as she creates textile paintings and mends
clothing. It’s a mystery how stitch-time
can stretch out like a field of wildflowers.

She wonders if a shirt or sweater
finds it satisfying to be worn day after day
despite having many holes, and if the spider
feels satisfaction that its web still catches prey
even as it becomes tattered. 

The seamstress considers curiosity holy,
and ponders whether mystery satisfies
better than understanding.
Knowledge, mystery—
will one outlast the other?

Meg Freer grew up in Montana and now enjoys the outdoors in Ontario. She holds two music degrees and a creative writing certificate, is a member of The Ontario Poetry Society and League of Canadian Poets, and is Poetry Co-editor for The Sunlight Press and a Contributing Editor for Traces Journal. She co-hosts a monthly series featuring poetry performed simultaneously with live improvised music. Her prose, photos, and poems have been published in many journals, and she has published four poetry chapbooks. During 2024-25, she served as Poet-in-Residence for the McDonald Astroparticle Physics Institute at Queen’s University.

Mokelumne Wilderness Insomnia
Sierra Nevada, California


Early September had a foot in winter.
Sunset, then nowhere to go but inside the tent, 		
double-layered, still exposed, 
crescendoing wind playing pines like strings. 

Nestled in the sleeping bag, 
I could see nothing of the wild nightlife,
listened to murmurs (a deer mouse checking us out?)
whooshing (an owl swooping down on its prey?) 
rustling (a bear stalking our food box?), 
disembodied sounds.

Eyes open at 2 a.m., I emerged,
raised my gaze to close-packed stars, 
the sky a pointillist painting, darkness illuminated.
I felt embraced, significant. There was meaning, 
beyond the sparkles and below.

Simona Carini was born and grew up in Italy. She writes poetry and nonfiction (memoir, food, the outdoors)and has been published in various venues, online and in print, including Amethyst Press anthology Thin Places & Sacred Spaces (2024). Her first poetry collection Survival Time was published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions (2022). She lives in Northern California with her husband, loves to spend time outdoors and in the kitchen. Her website is https://simonacarini.com

Isaac Sees the Light

Before moving to Colorado, Raima Larter was a chemistry professor who secretly wrote fiction and poetry and tucked it away in drawers. She has published four novels, a nonfiction book, and numerous short stories. She is Nonfiction Editor at Utopia Science Fiction. Read more at raimalarter.com.

Rosh Hashanah 

The new year came
And with it the rain,
The rain on my face
And the revelation too:

Tingling magic
In prickling droplets.
I looked up at God, 
In the billowing gray.

It came back like a song,
As it danced through my soul.
It's back again like a sigh,
Baruch Hashem.

Zoë Glimcher was born and raised in NYC. She studies English and Art History at Wellesley College. Using modern imagery, Zoë strives to bring the beauty of form into the present. Her poetry has won multiple prizes, including the Wainwright Sonnet Prize and an Honorable Mention for the Academy of American Poets University and College Poetry Prize.

After the Towers Collapsed

I was outside talking to the trees,
large maples still green in their taffeta. 

I wanted to know why everything deemed 
profound always seemed so very dark. 

I don’t want to be a character in that book, 
I said.  

	     Wind flowed like a river current 
in the leaves, a soft burble of sound, 

the conversation ordinary, even a bit dull, 
but for the way sunlight diced the leaves 

with hints of early autumn ochre and mustard
in the lime and moss and avocado green.

				Let me vanish 
again in that mysterious window, this time

with complete abandon. Like stained glass
in an old cathedral. For a brief, pregnant

moment, there was nothing left to fear.

Doug Talley has MFA and BFA degrees in creative writing and a JD degree. He has authored two poetry collections, The Angel Voice of Irony (Morris Publishing) and Adam’s Dream (Parables Publishing). A Pushcart nominee, his poems have appeared in the American Scholar, Tupelo Quarterly, Tampa Review, Christianity & Literature, and other journals. As a lawyer, he has worked to recover Jewish assets confiscated by Nazis during World War II. Presently, he leads a writers’ workshop for inmates in a women’s prison.

Excerpts From Remarks Given by the Angel of History
at the Arch of Titus, October 9, 2025

I was there when Cain slew Abel,
I was present when Amalek savaged the Hebrews
fleeing Egypt. I embedded with Joshua’s army
during the conquest of Canaan, the defeat of 31 kings.
From beneath a cashew tree, I watched Saul’s troops
proscribe the Amalekites. I saw the Temple twice destroyed,
Judah taken in chains to Babylon -- and then again to Rome.
I have followed the cycles of war and retribution through the ages.
My own bleeding eyes witnessed the slaughter at Khyber.
I rode in the Crusades, stood in the crowds to watch the burnings
of the Inquisition. I was in Hebron 1929, Jerusalem 1936,
pressed into stinking cattle cars with the starving and diseased,
flew with the cloud-seeding ash at Treblinka and Chelmno,
sat in the rubble of Berlin.
As always – as ever – there is murmuring talk
of turning swords into ploughshares. We forget at our peril,
the opening lines of that misunderstood prophecy.
In the end of days, it declares, all nations will flow to God.
I have not seen the end; I do not see it now.
Redemption cannot be willed.
Redemption cannot be forced.
Let us hope for the best but prepare for the worst.
As we have done for some five millennia, my office
stands ready to assist. My door is open.

Jonathan Cohen lives in Norwalk, Connecticut. His poems have appeared SALT, Image, Cloudbank and I-70 Review, among others. He has published two chapbooks – Work Songs (Finishing Line Press) and Coffee for Meg (Kelsay Books).

Under wind and rain


that sweeps in from the left,
wind and rain that charges 
everything, that shakes 
closed doors and lifts
open doors from hinges,
 
(impostor!) who first charms
like the sweet breeze  
that made Elijah famous,
soft as a shiver, disarming
the looming, angry trees,

that soon claims us,
takes chances, a whirl-
wind, like Job’s caustic
God, mighty shameless
saver of the wide world,

God, the comic, cosmic
shaker-upper of our losses,
who picks up that coin (us)
yeah, picks us up and flips
us, heads we win, tosses

us again into the pond, finds
us (God’s joke) in a fish’s
mouth, under wind and a rain-
pocked pool, a water-mine
of eternal circles: so, so rich. 

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.

Neon Epiphany 

Bathed by the monsoon rain,
Then tucked warm in bed, 
The drenched world quietened
By the lullaby of drizzle.

I went out into the buzz of the city
On a quest for my lost self 
In the aftermath of a torrential storm,
Hoping my villainous doubts out there
Would be wholly scoured.

Found everything sparkling
With sacred tranquility— 
Except for this wandering me.

In that stretch of living doubt,
When my head draped low,
Thoughts convened like mud on the path. 

Neon lights glimmering upon
A rain puddle at my feet
From the sprightly corner shop
Were a revelation portrayed.

I saw the colours mingle,
Seeping into each other: 
Red into green,
Purple into blue,
My face, a blurred ornament in between, 
Too distant to be touched. 

It was the summary; 
It was the theme.

The rain cleared the view— 
Not outside, but in the mundane, 
Inverted and condensed in a tiny puddle.
An unsung, harmonious epiphany. 

The question is me.
The answer is me.

My eyelashes soaked in the rising mist. 

Meerub Tariq is a 12th-grade student, writer, and aerospace engineering enthusiast. Her work has appeared in various literary journals, and she has co-authored anthologies. Outside of writing, she enjoys reading, skating and playing the flute. She recently made a preliminary asteroid discovery as a NASA Citizen Scientist. Connect with her at meerubtariq.carrd.co and on Instagram @memeerub7 

Sparrow Prayer


a tiny bird
russet with gold wingtips
flits in and out of sunlight
in a tangled green shrub

checking left then right
for taloned predator
does she know
how the light adores her?

or sense me watching
from the edge of the trail
my glance a prayer
a token of kinship

may the air rest easy
on her feathered back
as her twitching tail celebrates
the sunlit world she moves through

Alfred Fournier is a writer and community volunteer in Phoenix, Arizona. His poems and creative nonfiction have appeared in The Indianapolis Review, Hole in the Head 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.