Amethyst Review

Prayer

A list of names sellotaped
inside a bible;
particular people remembered
on particular days.
A quiet place, a mindful space,
attention paid to moments,
feelings, objects, people.
A conversation threaded
through the minutes
of each day, who, what,
when and where, and why.
Reflection on a passage,
tasting and savouring words,
images and meanings.
Words to comfort,
challenge or inspire;
words to shape our being 
and doing in conversation
using improvisation.
A listening time,
in quiet, hearing
the sounds only
revealed in silence.

Jonathan Evens is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell and Area Dean of Basildon. Previously Associate Vicar for HeartEdge at St Martin-in-the-Fields, he was involved in developing HeartEdge as an international and ecumenical network of churches engaging congregations with culture, compassion and commerce. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, an impassioned study of the role of music in cultural life written through the prism of Christian belief, and writes regularly on the visual arts and The Arts more generally for national arts and church media including Artlyst, ArtWay and Church Times. He blogs at joninbetween.blogspot.com.

Good Things that Fall from the Sky

 
Surely there’s the weather, altogether an airshow 
with beams of sun in free fall, a blizzard’s 
daredeviling, even the soundtrack of rain,
 
and there are the space gems and aerial debris, 
all those tokens that fall through the atmosphere, 
landing with clues to new cosmologies,
 
and there’s manna, from ages past, 
its descent day after day after day as steady 
and mysterious as scripture,
 
and then there’s you, brother, glint-eyed master 
of rivers and engines, of wings and gray weather, 
now soaring higher than you did before,
 
and there’s my own skyfall, a shadow inside 
that loops and spins over and over, gifting me 
flashes of the tilted grin that lit a sky— 
that way you had of just wanting to assure 
and be reassured: everything will be all right. 

Carrie Awbrey’s poetry has appeared in The Formalist, Sequoia: Stanford Literary Magazine, The Sunlight Press, and Lakeside Magazine. She received a BA in English with Creative Writing/Poetry focus from Stanford, where she was awarded the Dorrit Sibley Writing Prize in Poetry. Originally from Washington state, she now lives with her husband in Northern California.

All Day Long I Feel Created


1.
As the deer pantenth after
the Honda struck at 65 
and pulled over with a steaming 
clunka-clunka, radiator 
bent and bloodied as a broken nose, 
driver distraught and uninsured 
but unfazed by the life-clinging doe 
halfway in the ditch, so my soul 
panteth after you.

2.
Every day I’m rescued,
each and every day I’m saved.


3.
My forklift chirps reversal,
schlepping stainless steel pipe, 
popping over puckered pavement.
A ladybug lands on the wheel knob.
A ladybug lifts its elytra. 
The wings beneath are mirrors.
Pipe finds dunnage with hydraulic 
lurch. A ladybug lifts off,
	lifts away. 

4. 
Kiss my face off! Kiss 
me right into oblivion!

5.
Last night I line-danced to Lizzo’s “Juice” 
with Jean Valentine’s daughter
and understood miaphysitism
for the first time, so forgive me for asking,
but when I unzip my skin from crown 
to crotch and my so-far self heaps 
sloppy at my feet, please, 
Jesus God, let it be you at last in the 
mirror I see. 

Riley Richards received an MFA in Poetry from Fairleigh-Dickinson University, taught Creative Writing and Political Writing at Uzhhorod National University in Uzhhorod, Ukraine, and is currently a PhD student at Florida State University. Riley’s writing has been published or is forthcoming in Fugue, After Happy Hour Review, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere.

The life of the spirit is the life of the body, twice removed

On the dark glass of the river,
the reflection of church steeple–

its white point rippling now
and then as the ducks pass about.

Between the dark hardwood pews
inside, the parishioners exchange

“Peace be with you”– some looking
out the windows to the still stream,

where the reflection points outward–
some engaging their shyer neighbors–

one craning yet again to the stained 
glass gothic representation of Moses 

in the rushes, being offered tenderly 
skyward by an enslaved washerwoman.

Michael J. Galko is a scientist and poet who lives and works in Houston, TX. He was a finalist in the 2020 Naugatuck River Review and the 2022 Bellevue Literary Review poetry contests. Recent poems have appeared or will appear in Spillway Magazine, Atlanta Review, Silk Road, and Plainsongs.

The Cosmic Law of Intention

Everywhere and everything is brimming with intention. 
The hammer intends to hit. 
The nail intends to penetrate. 
The mosquito intends to live, and bite. 
The wasp intends to live, and sting. 
The pebble intended to be part of the mountain 
   but failed, so intended to be a boulder, 
      but failed, so intended to be a stone, 
         but failed, and became a pebble,
            but now intends to be a jewel on my table. 
Nothing is pointless, though we may not see the point. 
Nothing disobeys the law of intention. 
Life intends to live 
and the stars to shine.

Edward Alport is a retired teacher and proud Essex Boy. He occupies his time as a poet, gardener and writer for children. He has had poetry, articles and stories published in various webzines and magazines and performed on BBC Radio and Edinburgh Fringe. He sometimes posts snarky micropoems on Twitter as @cross_mouse.

The Big Bang

I lean back in my upholstered seat, 
eyes scanning the orchestra program
while strings, brass and winds tune to A.
Suddenly, the house lights dim and 
pre-concert chatter ceases; everyone can hear
the conductor as he strides onto the stage, 
his leather soles slapping the polished 
wood floor. Concert-goers, warm and
comfortable in their plush seats, break 
into applause; with just a curt nod
of his head, the conductor steps 
onto the podium, raises his baton, 
then brings it down sharply. 
The earlier silence is shattered 
like a crystal ball by shiny, 
explosive brass; it is fireworks; 
it is shooting stars, and I think, 

This is how the Big Bang 
must have sounded; 
the Creator would not 
have chosen anything less 
splendid to announce 
her most glorious design. 
No matter that French horns, 
trumpets, and trombones did not yet exist.
Nor, for that matter, did France.

Mary Ellen Shaughan lives and writes in Western Massachusetts. Her poetry has appeared in Gyroscope Review, Amethyst Review, Skipjack Review, a&u: American’s AIDS Magazine, Red Rover, and several anthologies. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she hones her craft writing 30 poems each November in support of new Americans. Her 1st book of poetry, Home Grown, can be found on Amazon and elsewhere.

Possessed

At first sight, Mary struck me as an eighty-something Jane Austen in Spandex—barely five feet tall, thinning hair spun into limp ringlets and a messy bun, as compulsive a talker as Mrs. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice or Miss Bates in Emma. At the antique mall where she still worked, she led me past glass cases crammed with vintage jewelry, along shelves stuffed with piggybanks and music boxes—their tiny dancers frozen mid-twirl—and around a six-foot suit of armor. Chattering nonstop, she traipsed to the back of the store and back in time, where dealers had jammed their booths with china cabinets, spindled bassinets, wooden snow shoes, and cross-stitched platitudes. Like Mary, the place went on and on.

My stepfather, still spry at 92, strode behind us. Carl met Mary here shortly after my mother died, and they have spent countless hours gleefully thrifting. Her home was a miniature mirror-image of this sprawling asylum for castoffs—every surface littered with tchotchkes, walls covered with framed jests, closets brimming with musty clothes and canned food stockpiled during the pandemic. Whenever Mary’s nephew hauled away the excess, she replaced it all within weeks.

Every visit made me shudder. A purger by nature, when I downsized from 2,500 square feet to 500, I felt freed to live a larger life in a smaller space. I do hoard one thing—words, specifically words for every essay: descriptors for a sculptor’s tools, a horologist’s watch parts, and cloud formations for a piece about cloud spotting. But Carl doted on Mary, so I submitted to these visits, taking deep breaths until we could leave.

Prompted by falls, frailty, and forgetfulness, last year Mary moved into a nursing home, which curbed her hoarding. While my move allowed my soul to expand, Mary’s circumscribed hers. Reduced to one room of possessions, she left those behind when congestive heart failure took her to hospice, where she slept and raved, slept and raved.

As her organs began shutting down, she entered that liminal timespace where no one can predict how long dying can take. I saw with Carl, now frail enough himself to fade away, amid his own clutter. Did dying wrench away all of Mary’s acquisitions—the belongings that, to me, encumbered her life but which may have shielded her from the losses of aging? Will my death be just one more relinquishment? Will I take my time going where I don’t know what to expect, the place only words take me, the home they’ve given me all these years? The words Austen wrote when she was forced to leave behind her birthplace come to mind: “when shall I cease to regret you!—when learn to find a home elsewhere?”

Gail Tyson’s writing includes The Vermeer Tales, a chapbook of prose published by Shanti Arts, and recently her creative nonfiction has appeared in About Place Journal, Catamaran Literary Review, and Still Point Arts Quarterly. An alumna of Stanford’s Creative Writing Program and the Dylan Thomas Summer School at the University of Wales, she has made her home since 2023 in Santa Cruz, CA.

A crack in the road

A random zigzag scars
the tarmac and heads towards the house.
He steps over it, winds his way like a drunk
along its crazy length. Straddles it.
Watches it cut between his feet. 

Day after day he checks it
but nothing happens and no-one else cares.
Time passes. He no longer notices
the lightning-fork line that stops
at his door. Other things on his mind,
he heads to work.

It is only when he sleeps,
when he has sloughed off
the day’s torn skin,
that he needs to run, break free
of something dark, unbounded,
powerful. He is running through air
and falling, falling into
his sweat-damp mattress.

He opens the door and studies the crack.
Crouches down and traces its edge,
then forces his fingers into the wound.
He feels like an action hero
whose superpowers move the earth.
And then he feels weightless, breathless.
Free-falling, falling into
the sweat-damp pain. 

He has found where the crack starts
and where the mending begins. 

Joanne Maybury has lived in Uganda and Sudan, has worked a variety of roles and latterly has journeyed with the chronically and terminally ill. She now lives in the borderlands of Scotland where she is learning, amongst other things, to be a hopeful gardener. She loves dark chocolate and sunflowers and (almost) always has an acorn in her pocket. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Scotland, Theology, Penumbra Online, Heart of Flesh and others.

Cuerpo y Culpa		
						-for Sonia

I’m always confusing Jueves y javes,
Thursday and keys.

Or abogados y albondigas,
lawyers and meatballs.

and I always stop 
and think about cuerpo
y culpa; which is body?
which is fault?

When your body was
mostly bone, you were thirsty. 
I plugged a straw with my finger, 
dribbled water into your parted 
lips. You coughed, you sputtered,

your bones shook like 
bamboo wind chimes.  
Lo siento! Lo siento, 
es mi culpa! I said.
I’m sorry! I’m sorry, 
it’s my fault!

(A fault line in 
the Himalayas is 
1300 miles long.)

No, Mali, you creaked,
the effort for English costing you
all the coins left in your pocket, 
No, Mali. Nothing is your fault.

A fault myself, then,
a chasm, filling with groundwater, 
my ribs curling into cliff, 

into shoreline. 
I am a lake now, 

a reservoir. 
I go there, to myself.
I fish, dangling my 
legs over the edge; I
reel in compassion. 
I make a meal of it.

Emily Rodgers-Ramos is the author of a YA novel, Riding the Double Helix; and Hyphen, a poetry collection. Her poems have appeared in the The Dry Creek Review, The Greyrock Review, Nanny Fanny, The Lilliput Review, The Progenitor Art and Literary Journal: Speak Peace, Chiaroscuro: An Anthology of Virtue and Vice, Exception/All: an anthology exploring what it means to be normal, and Gut Punch Literary.

At Leisure

I am at leisure now to tell you things.
That many y’s are x and x’s y.
That z may be what happens when you die.
That all the letters vary, little springs
on which you hang your tiny weights. Which brings
me to the point: my words and yours imply,
proclaim, equivocate, insult, deny,
exult—but to each word some doubt still clings.
Why I’m at leisure is of no concern
to you nor is just who or what I am.
I am the voice addressing you. You’ll learn
in time, or else you won’t, what kind of sham
or actuality this is. Don’t burn
to know. The tiger frets, but does the lamb?

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.