New Writing Engaging with the Sacred
Psalm
I want to speak heaven
into earth, into the fields
of wildflowers, into the
woodlands.
I want to braid heaven
into your hair, let you
see yourself resplendent,
see yourself divine.
Lit by that fire,
I see you, you are like
no other, you are essential
as the sun, as the heart.
Look at you shine.
Erin Olson is a counselor and poet from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her poems have appeared in a variety of publications, including Third Wednesday, ONE ART, and Sky Island Journal.
Meeting Minutes (Friends Meeting House, Rochester)
Hobbled by life, I searched for open doors
to escape this boastful, plug-in city.
Found one, just as the weather was coming fast.
In here, my place was already set
with silence waiting, inviting me to sit.
Silence was a hail-fellow-well-met type
(of hitherto, I had not cared for), but
he had friends – each with eyes closed,
messaging in their own private channels. I joined them
bringing only an elevated ear.
My blood clock listed the seconds, minutes.
I watched shadows sit, stretch, then rise to leave –
and then return like jealous agnostics.
Silence worked the room – a trainer breathing,
train rails seething, the brush of frond on glass.
Silence told me, but I never asked.
Spoke with mailed fist – I considered leaving,
but silence invited me to sit.
Spoke with bare-knuckle – and I rose to leave,
but silence invited me to sit.
With ten minutes left, silence left me to it
and when my ungummed, Wedgewood eyes opened,
something came on and came on unbidden.
Something much bigger than the rational,
something once buried, something once hidden.
Into drying weather and milk happy,
into once engraved streets (storm windows down),
into a human river – broad, boiling.
I heard nothing – and have heard nothing, since
the day silence invited me to sit.
Joseph Long lives and works on the Medway as a father and Engineer, writing poetry between shifts. He has a passion for works which reflect working class life & culture and his main influences are John Cooper Clarke, Ted Hughes, Robert Lowell, Douglas Dunn, Ian Hamilton & Seamus Heaney.
Joseph has been published by Stand, Blackbox Manifold, The Rumen, The Brussels Review and ingénu/e and he was also highly commended in the Erbacce Prize for Poetry in 2024.
Children of Encouragement
Gray stone chapel waiting
in the new green morning
I pull the door and plunge
into still shadow thick
as a carpet of pine
I start about the business
of setting up for Mass
laying out the books
the booklets the chairs
shake out twelve
perfect creamy wafers
from their plastic sleeve
place them on a paten
of green clay swirling
smooth as sea glass
mix wine with water
my own miniscule miracle
click a hot pink lighter
touch flame to dusty wicks
breathe in and wait
more arrive hushed
and sleepy-eyed
not many but enough
for us to say Amen
and hear another’s voice
saying Amen too
this is no great ecstasy
just simple people simply
praying—oh, for more
ordinary love like this
Erika Takacs is an Episcopal priest, teacher, and poet originally from Wilmington, Delaware. Her writing has been published in Earth & Altar, The Christian Century, Braided Way, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and as a part of the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Poetry in Plain Sight. Outside of her work and her family, her three great loves are the music of J.S. Bach, books, and baseball. She currently resides in North Carolina, where she and her husband serve at the pleasure of their very spoiled beagle.
Cellular Theology
It is late. He should sleep, but tonight the monk feels a restless pull from the manuscript before him. Under the frail, flickering candle, the illuminated capital letter (the T of Tau) shimmers with gold filigree. It is a beacon—but the apostle’s words that follow are dull, mere shadows. Whenever this mood descends, everything becomes leaden—all that is real is the sullen flesh. His hand rests heavy on the vellum: calf skin. His quill is nothing but a bird feather: a dead thing plucked from a dead thing.
His gaze drifts to the whimsy added by a previous brother in Christ: a single peacock feather decorating the margin. Inexplicable. Indulgent. Why does it rivet him now?
His mind fixates on a vast peacock strutting before drab peahens, and regards his own drab robe—his solitary cell. He curses himself. Why does everything distract? Even in this cold, dark stone room—or because it is so plain?—so many serpentine streams flow underground into indulgent fantasy. Self-regard. A species of sloth. Why do feeble minds twist away, perverse, from the sacred source: the refreshing lake of God’s presence?
His mind fans out at the vague threat of Viking invasion. He fantasizes about killing marauders—engaging in the righteous slaughter of heathens. Protecting The Word. Him! Hero martyr monk! The banality of pride…
It is not all my fault, he defends himself feebly. His imagination is vivid from all the visualization techniques the Abbot taught him as a boy, training him to recollect all manner of catechism. To this day, each sin and virtue has a geometric shape and a color for him. And if his mind drifts, it may be because he hasn’t eaten a full meal in days—partially out of devotions, but mostly by circumstance. The oat stores grow thin, and weevils wriggle in the porridge, putting him off his repast.
The abbey cat purrs in the corner. Is she enjoying infused meditation? Bright dreams of bloody murder? He remembers her asleep outside in the summer, her head resting in a halo of feathers. What is it like to hunt? To pounce and—
No! An error! A cursed error! A repeated letter. Has he ruined the page?
He can’t lift his hand. His skin is fused with the calfskin vellum—one continuous medium. Something burns. He slides up his sleeve. Script swirls under the skin of his forearm—not Greek, Latin, Aramaic… The letters blaze. It hurts to look directly at it. He screws his eyes shut.
***
The peacock pattern unfurls in every direction. Within the details of each feather the monk spies interlocking figures: every martyr and persecutor, every sinner and saint, every angel and demon that has ever been or may ever be, all emerging from each other—dazzling symmetries! Consistent as syllogism! The Unsayable Form behind all forms!
Peering closer, the monk spies infinite monks with infinite concentration encoding the manuscript of manuscripts. They work in tiny cells—it is cells all the way down! Great cities emerge, and from them the City of Cities, its noise become choruses of perfection, its stink become perfume. Infinite city, and script, and scribes are one, are many. Sublime glory.
Now the feathers part: a gate. He is the gate, the opening, the way.
***
The abbey cat wakes with a start. She mews, then pads off, preying near the stone crevices where pests cower and twitch between frantic dashes into the light. The cat is oblivious to the new image on the vellum: peacock feathers perfectly rendered, profuse, swallowing all text, all errors, all sin. Beautiful, but unreadable. As the stern Abbot would say: what human eye could draw sense from such a wayward sign?
Colm O’Shea is a Clinical Associate Professor of essay writing at New York University.
Bethany Jarmul is an Appalachian writer and poet. She’s the author of two chapbooks. Her debut poetry collection Lightning Is a Mother is forthcoming with ELJ Editions in February, 2025. Her work has been published in many magazines including Rattle, Brevity, HAD, and Salamander. Her writing was selected for Best Spiritual Literature 2023 and Best Small Fictions 2024, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, The Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and Wigleaf Top 50. Connect with her at bethanyjarmul.com or on social media: @BethanyJarmul.
Coattails
Rabbi Bluzhov recounted he was standing on one
side of a pit with a young free thinker, their friendship
forged in the camps, impossible anywhere else.
Two halves of a world without overlap.
Cemented by disparate certitude, the young man
resigned to imminent death, the rabbi adamant
in his opposition. The Nazi, an Angel of Death,
taunted them with life if they could jump over.
Decades later, the rabbi recounted how
he grasped the coattails of his father.
his father’s father, great grandfather,
all the way to Abraham.
When he opened his eyes, both prisoners
were standing on the other side of the pit.
The story is repeated from one century
to the next, on another continent, sometimes
in a language many doubted would survive.
Until now, on a warm Sabbath morning,
the rabbi’s grandson recounts it to a room
filled with believers and non-believers,
each side still as chess pieces as they listen.
Carol V. Davis is the author of Below Zero, Because I Cannot Leave This Body and Between Storms. She won the 2007 T.S. Eliot Prize (USA) for Into the Arms of Pushkin: Poems of St. Petersburg. Her poetry has been read on National Public Radio, the Library of Congress and Radio Russia. Twice a Fulbright scholar in Russia, she taught in Siberia, winter 2018 and teaches in Los Angeles. A 3rd Fulbright for Russia was awarded, postponed because of Covid and now cancelled. Donna Sternberg and Dancers is using Davis’ poetry in the recent piece, “Ancestors’ Voices.”
Clouds
Clouds are concentrated water vapor
held together by our dreams
shaped by wishes--
the cirrus cloud that sculpts itself
into a gull protecting its kin
feeding below as a lonely mother
looks up and holds the sight
forever in her mind
or the tops of cumulus clouds
suddenly lit by the sun
lifts a man out of his wheelchair
willing himself to walk.
Janet Krauss, after retirement from teaching 39 years of English at Fairfield University, continues to mentor students, lead a poetry discussion at the Wilton Library, participate in a CT. Poetry Society Workshop, and one other plus two poetry groups. She co–leads the Poetry Program of the Black Rock Art Guild. She has two books of poetry : Borrowed Scenery (Yuganta Press) and Through the Trees of Autumn (Spartina Press). Many of her poems have been published in Amethyst Review, and her haiku in Cold Moon Journal.
The Cure for Grief
What cure for grief
presents itself
but to notice the
brittle rust of
onion skin
opening beneath the silent
knife, the hum the air makes,
the taste of bitter juices?
What balm can we reach for
but now, this moment, sealing
it from all other moments
with the seal of faint hope?
What cure for grief but
the breathing in
and out again?
What cure for blindness
but to see?
Dean Abbott is a writer, poet and pastoral counselor living in Kentucky. He can be contacted through http://www.deanabbott.com or on X @deanabbott.
Wilda Morris who retired from a career in Christian education, is Workshop Chair of Poets and Patrons of Chicago and a past President of the Illinois State Poetry Society. She has published numerous poems in anthologies, webzines, and print publications, including Brass Bell, Haiku Canada, and Modern Haiku. She has won awards for formal and free verse and haiku. Wilda has published three books of poetry, Szechwan Shrimp and Fortune Cookies: Poems from a Chinese Restaurant, Pequod Poems: Gamming with Moby-Dick, and At Goat Hollow and Other Poems.
Imagine
I feel a touch of Grandpa’s ice-grey hand
as he heaves the words:
I can see them
their outstretched arms a bridge of gold.
His gasping mouth ellipses in rapture
then his torso bolts erect.
He gazes an all consuming kindness
as we watch him leave his eyes.
He had been a sailor on a warship
was seventeen
when seven of his mates had fallen in
to the sea’s exploding black gullet.
Their arms raised pleading
distraught heads bobbing
called him:
Bert, Bert.
and water slopped savage
into the silk
hollows of their lungs leaving him
with a bandoleer of guilt.
His fellow feeling still so strong
had taken on a sweet song.
Desire held out the other end of the stick,
rattled something more permanent
than what that monster
could devour.
We join hands above him
and pray that the waves are singing
Kate Hill-Charalambides is an English teacher of dual nationality who lives in Alsace. She has worked for an association against human trafficking which is recognized as being of public utility. Her poetry focuses on human rights, spirituality and feminism. Her poetry has appeared in Dreich 3 Season 9 (No.99), Snakeskin and will appear in the next edition of Cerasus Poetry.
Amethyst Review 