Amethyst Review

Rumored Among the Living

The purple morning cracks open | leaving the shadows split |
the ivory-billed, laid in the tomb | the orange glow drawing out
the breath of the dirt | once covering the grass |
near the women who discover | women who tell |
men’s ears pitched too high | the newborn light yawns awake |
the ivory-billed rumored to be spotted among the living |
one white stripe caught at the tree line

J. R. Welch is a multi-disciplinary artist born and raised in Hayti, Missouri, in the Bootheel, and based in New Orleans for over two decades. His writing has appeared in Reckon Review, Queen’s Review, Pictura Journal, The Christian Century, and Blueline Magazine. He was longlisted by Kristen Arnett for the Southeast Review World’s Best Short-Short Story. His art has been featured at the George Dunbar Gallery, in Gulf Stream Magazine, and Oakland Review. He is a 2026 Arts Interchange Resident with the Ross Lynn Foundation.

Ecstatic Axis 

In an old Turkish city, 
a black cloak is worn to be shed,
as dancers align themselves 
with the turning world. 

Meshing gears move clock hands
to the right, around the face.
 
The dancer-as-axis spins left 
and the ensemble flows right, 
spin and counter-spin in balance. 

A tall black hat is worn throughout,
a still point within movement.

Arms are lifted  
with the right hand palm-up,
receiving grace, and the left hand 
palm-down to share what is received.
 
The long white skirt 
lifts and turns,
like vast star-field spirals
that wheel in the black,
and hidden turnings
too fast to see. 

The reedy ney,
all fire and longing,
and heartbeat drums
that keep the dancers whirling,
wind down and pause.

Heads bow
in rippling silence  
as incense rises.

A man dressed in red 
recites Rumi softly.

Bob Rama lived and studied in East Asia for thirteen years, primarily in Japan. His work draws on Japanese aesthetics. He now works as a translator in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

On the Rim of Neruda’s Well

We sat there, he and I, 
on the rim of Neruda’s well 
staring into the darkness.

The full moon’s light played 
with the meadow’s rolling hills, great grass tufts, 
and the western inside wall of the well.

I was illuminated, the man was not –
though the man might have thought the same thing – 
that he was illuminated, and I was not.

The man spoke, “In the sensing, there is only the sensed.
Thus, there is no thing here.  
Know that. There is no thing here.”

I looked around me, relishing the full-moon’s light,
the cool breeze, the slight dampness in the air.
The man disappeared from my consciousness,
sitting as he did so quietly in deep shadow 

until he spoke,
“You are located” he said, “neither here nor there, nor anywhere.”
I nodded in agreement, in the dark of the night, in the light of the moon,
in the reverie of the moment, 
and then I lost my way and found myself and fell into the dark – 
into the dark of the well and the well of the night, and into the light of the moon.

Paula Appling is a fiber artist, hiker, editor, poet, and a terrible cook. Her poetry has been published in Toasted Cheese, Caveat Lector, The Writing Disorder and Blue Lake Review. She recently published Shadow World, an unsettling poetic journey. She lives with her husband and 2 cats in South Carolina.

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.