Amethyst Review

What the Red Fox Says

Supposedly we bark, but rarely do.
Why would one need to ever speak so harshly
when you have whiskers that radar, help you navigate
a true line straight through the woods
even on blackest night?
Foxes do not wander, but walk with purpose.
We do not seek attention, acclaim, or affirmation, 
but quite the opposite:
we are ghosts of daytime light, 
hearing so keen we track voles burrowing beneath.
You probably imagined us saying something simple:
“Dig deep into what rumbles beneath you.
Find your other and mate in February
so you have Christmas babies.”

But one fall day in our woods
you walked over a rise
just a few feet from where
I dug for mice in a sawdust pile.
We both levitated
Up and back a foot or more,
--you in Joy, at the miracle
of my magical auburn fur
--me in embarrassment
at the failure that shamed my gifts.

In that split second our eyes locked,
I saw “red” flash in your thoughts.
Did you mean
red from shame
or red with rage?
Were you simply focusing my attention
 to the color of berries, blooms and birds?
No, it must be blood and my glorious fur, 
of course, the colors of Life and Death.
Creation breathes out 
only a word at a time to me.

So I spoke a psalm to you
letting you carry it away
like the stone from the creekbank:



We are here to haunt,
quantum Beauty and Joy
that only exists when observed,
our red particles assembling
from dust, light, frantic atoms,
apparitions without the Dark,
without the dread or grief,
you before you were born,
you as merely a theory,
you without Words
in the vast bliss of silence
before the red,
before the craving, striving, 
before longing.
We are the Quiet.

Rita Quillen’s most recent poetry book, Some Notes You Hold (Madville 2020) has received a Bronze Medal from the Feathered Quill Book Awards, a finalist listing for poetry in the American Writing Awards, and is a Bonus Book for the 2023 International Pulpwood Queens and Timber Guys Book Club. Her novel, Wayland, published by Iris Press in 2019, is the March 2022 Bonus Book of the Month for the International Pulpwood Queens and Timber Kings Book Club. It is a sequel to her first novel, Hiding Ezra (Little Creek Books, 2014).

Keeping Watch

God is waiting for me behind hazy eyes
at the pulpit. 

In the blue and gold statue of Mary 

He rests, a baby sleeping stone still in 
her arms. 

He is waiting for me in the space 
between my top and bottom eyelid

When I lower my forehead into my hands 
and let my gaze drop towards the ground.

In the cracks of the wooden floorboards, He is
waiting for me.

Sometimes approaching in my imagination, 
the mind’s eye brings something close to forgetting.

“Not yet,” you whispered. “Not now.”

Emmarae Stein is a writer from Upstate New York. She is a Ph.D. student in the History Department at the University of Rochester where she researches early modern religious and intellectual history.

Earthbound

Maybe I’ve already died//and been sent back
Time//after time//after time//again

Like the person who uses their second wish//to forget the first
Only to use their third//to reinstate the now-unknown original:
without the gift of learning from the past//we have no way of knowing the alternatives
So it’s better to trust that this//right now//is better than the alternative
Even if I don’t remember//what exactly the alternative was 

I don’t know what it was like in the interim
But what I do know
Is that at the moment
I get to take advantage of everything 
That’s now available here for me

Everything I probably missed
If I could remember missing it

Can you miss your hometown
If the memory is scrubbed
Squeaky Clean
With steel wool?

The heart knows there’s something to miss
And even if you don’t mourn the place
You can still mourn the memory
And feel where it used to be
Like a tongue probing where a tooth was

I don’t know what used to occupy this space
But I do know that plenty of other things
Appear to fit nicely
In the gaps that may have been left behind

Swimming in the ocean
On the night of a full moon
Watching the tree line get thicker
And the mountains getting larger
And larger
To the point that they get small again

Overwhelming emotions
That slosh throughout the chemicals
Clearing out the sinuses
And the soul
With ruthless efficiency
But a feeling of catharsis after the storm

The blissful mundanity
And overwhelmingly modern convenience
Of picking items up
Off of a grocery store shelf
Time after time after time again

Loving
And being loved

I like how these things fit
In the [redacted] space

It can be good here

Maybe it’s for the best
I can’t remember what it’s like
To really and truly lose all of it

To remember what it feels like
For it to suddenly be gone
Out of my grasp
And then finally
(Cruelly)
(Blissfully)
Returned to a more
Appreciative
Open hand

Even when it doesn’t remember why it’s open

Even if all it knows
Is that inevitably it’s been posed
Frozen
Cemented in place
With the intention
Of finally 
Grasping
Something

Allison Rueb (she/they) is a newly emerging poet whose work attempts to explore the quiet moments and overlooked details of everyday life. Drawing inspiration from personal reflection, nature, and the shifting textures of memory, her writing seeks to illuminate the emotional undercurrents beneath ordinary experiences. New to the literary landscape, Allison is currently developing their first collection while sharing individual poems through workshops, local readings, and online publications. They are passionate about experimenting with form, voice, and imagery as they continue to discover their place in the world of contemporary poetry.

Finding You


“How will I be able to find you?”
you asked me, looking up	
into my eyes, more fervently
than I’ve ever seen, your eyes
tearing.  I said, “We’ll always
be able to find one another.
You’ll be able to find me,
and I’ll be able to find you.
There is a direct line we have
to each other, from your heart
to mine.  So, wherever we are
there will be any number
of ways to get back to the other,”
already feeling the longing
begin to build in my chest.
Upon which, after speaking,
you looked up at me again,
satisfied with the assurance
I had given you, smiling 
with such trust I believed 
what I announced to you 
without any sense of having 
just made up a story, but 
because I promised to get 
the sweetest strawberries 
at the market that I would 
clean and slice in the kitchen 
before I came to see you, 
having missed you more 
than I could possibly say;
before I drove the roads 
in the semi-darkness, and up 
the Notch, then back down, 
already eager for our seeing 
each other tomorrow morning, 
when, perhaps, you’d ask me 
again about whether 
the noise you heard was 
inside me,  as you looked 
at my chest, wondering if 
what you heard was in there.

Wally Swist’s new books include Aperture (Kelsay Books), poems regarding caregiving his spouse through Alzheimer’s, and If You’re the Dreamer, I’m the Dream: Selected Translations from Rilke’s Book of Hours (Finishing Line Press). Poems, essays, and translations have appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, Commonweal, Healing Muse, North American Review, Other Journal, Rattle, and Your Impossible Voice. Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012) was co-winner of the 2011 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition. He was also the winner of the Ex Ophidia Press Poetry Prize in 2018 for A Bird Who Seems to Know Me.

sanctuary 

as i sit meditating with trees
i know they will whisper nothing	
for they have already found what i seek
they will let the wind speak for itself
and the sky will invite me again into its silence
such is the turning earth
as the sun ribbons its way through these woods
this place
the mystery whose flesh is sacred 
with soil and bark and leaves
and fur and wing
the mystery of all things wild
the mystery i sit with 
                        sitting with the trees
		
		
		

Sister Lou Ella Hickman, OVISS, is a former teacher and librarian whose writings have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. Press 53 published her first book of poetry in 2015 entitled she: robed and wordless and her second, Writing the Stars, 2024. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017 and in 2020. James Lee III composed “Chavah’s Daughters Speak” for a concert held on May 11, 2021, at 92Y in New York City for five poems from her book. Another concert was held in Cleveland, Ohio on March 28, 2023, sponsored by the Cleveland Chamber Music Society.

Dragonfly

How dare you steal my eye and demand I slow down—
me, busy in my own fluttering about. There you go
flaunting your iridescence, flirting away 
with my hydrangea, flashing those hints of amber  
that lace your stain-glassed wings. I watch you 
cathedral the sky like the last lonely prayer,
taking my worries with you.

Shawn Aveningo Sanders shares the creative life with her husband in Oregon, where they run The Poetry Box. Her poems appear (or forthcoming) in Rattle, ONE ART, contemporary haibun online, McQueen’s Quinterly, Sheila-Na-Gig, Gyroscope Review, and Love Is for All of Us. Shawn is a multiple Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Touchstone Award nominee with prizes from the Oregon Poetry Association. Her newest book Pockets (MoonPath Press) was a finalist in Concrete Wolf’s Chapbook Contest. When she’s not writing, you might find her shopping for a new pair of red shoes or toy dinosaurs for her granddaughter. (RedShoePoet.com)

At Sea

When he was four months old we moved
his crib from beside our bed

to the tiny study beside the wall
with its National Geographic poster,

World Cetaceans, and for hours
he would stare: high-contrast orca,

lazy blue bottlenose, pink river dolphin.
They seemed to calm his kicking, his colic,

and we laughed and imagined the shapes
and colors of his future, Duke

Marine Lab, Biologist. But at 2 am
when we imagined him sleeping

we’d hear the tinkle of his music box,
pull-cord within the universe

of his grasp: Musician. Insomniac.
Shadows dancing on the wall. 

What waits beneath the what-will-be
like eyes fixed upon a whale?

We moved out of that apartment,
the poster torn and thrown away,

later our son blown out to sea, adrift
for years then tossed by storms,

all of us searching hard for some horizon
where perhaps blue dolphins leap.

Bill Griffin is a naturalist and retired family doctor in rural North Carolina. His seven previous books include the ecopoetry collection Snake Den Ridge, a Bestiary (illustrated by Linda French Griffin) in which creatures of the Great Smokies speak their minds and suggest that the dis-ease of our 21st century society could benefit from a dose of interdependence, reciprocity, and gratitude. Bill’s poetry appears in many regional and national publications. He has served as Poet-in-Residence at the North Carolina Zoo and was selected for the inaugural Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont Writer’s Conference, under faculty poet Frank X Walker.

Passage

I board the boat, escape
the city in search of Self,
float eye-level with drifting floes,
navigate grand galleries of ice,
gaze up at cathedral spires,
sculpted naves, pinnacles
and towers whose striations
blue, green, white dazzle,
trapped bubbles illuminated
by a sacred light.

Anne Eyries has poetry published in various journals, including Amsterdam Quarterly, Consilience, Cosmic Daffodil, Dream Catcher, Dust, Humana Obscura, London Grip, and Paperboats. She lives in France.