Author Archives: Sarah

Intercession


Pollen becomes 
honey through the 
intercession 
of one bold bee.

My prayers for you
fluttering throne-
ward like the dove
sacrificed, rise
translated and
presentable
only by the breath 
of the Spirit, holy.

My part in this 
miracle is
no greater than 
buzzing among 
blossoms and seeds,
obedient. 

K.L. Johnston is an author, poet, and photographer whose work has appeared in numerous literary magazines, anthologies, and travel journals as well as a photo illustrated book of meditations.  She holds a degree in English and Communications from the University of South Carolina and her wide-ranging interests contribute to her writing and art.  Her work explores the connections of humanity with the physical, spiritual, and liminal places she has stumbled into in her travels and in her own back yard.   She devotes her unscheduled time to writing and satisfying her curiosity about people and this planet. You can find out more by visiting her Facebook page “A Written World”.

From the Spear Side


Today a bumpy veil of clouds
   drifts, as though designed by a child’s
chalk-rubbing, tracing unlevel ground, 
the subtle rawness of some shale-
   turned-slate, flat but foliated.

   How their gas absorbs the light
and fastens it to blue, brocaded
   shimmer, sheen and blaze—not quite
a sun itself but its conveyance!

   What’s embossed but the faults and flaws
we fixate on—one odd misstatement, 
                                                           then
regrets recycled without pause:
remorse for true harm, shame for gauche
   gestures, thinking we’re too grossly
                                                          marred?
That gash, capacious, opens to stars.

Deborah J. Shore has spent most of her life housebound or bedridden with sudden onset severe ME/CFS. This neuroimmune illness has made engagement with and composition of literature costly and, during long seasons, impossible. She has won poetry competitions at the Anglican Theological Review and the Alsop Review. Her most recent or forthcoming publications include THINK, Thimble Lit, Ekstasis, Reformed Journal, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Christian Century, Relief Journal, and the Sejong Cultural Society.

Objects are Farther Away Than They Appear

All day there were tears about to come about to burst or leak or crash through something that sits in my heart a full magenta red vermillion blood crimson water balloon pulsing bouncing soft and consistent. This private gentle thudding of remembering pushing membrane walls. Always I have been this way swimming diving deeper seeing only those lighted sea creatures soundless and electric, thinking I would land somewhere but never stopping.    When you were here there were always moments of relief from my no-reason-for-it sadness.  Moments of forgetting. Bliss and quiet. 

All day I remember I am getting wherever I am going without you. No wonder I didn’t want to start this thing. Getting out of bed alone. Now decades long the filament between us more real than not. Precious metal fishing line transparent silver violet yellow gold citrine sparkling.  The water deep beneath my feet lapping.  Together we knew each rock and its echoing vibrations. In the mountain only we could walk. Paired footsteps in its memory.

Alone the journey gets so dark. Velvet black. Now blind I am feeling less and less afraid. Just curious.  The antennae of my skin leading me with love down inside the mountain. Nestled. Protected in its caves, in the wet sulfur smells. The expanse of water lapping along our rocks. I see these things and say these things. I am an inch away from seventy.  

Release the morning. 

Open to light.

Release the tears of a thousand seas. 

Heal me.

Bonnie Raphael is an artist and writer living in Thousand Oaks, California. She holds a master’s degree in art from California State University, Northridge, and a bachelor’s from Immaculate Heart College, formerly in Hollywood California – now closed, but very much alive in spirit. She is semi-retired from teaching, This is her first published poem. A lifelong Buddhist, she is grateful to Amethyst Review for the opportunity to share her work.

Deborah Confides in God

 
Most blessed of women be Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, most blessed of tent-dwelling women.
            --Judges 5:24

 
Deborah:    I never meant. 
I never planned. Never 
my intention oh Lord 
to love her.
 
God:     For love to be the geese 
flocking, the breeze 
that whispers the tops of the trees, 
the bench on the path, has always been
my intention. 
You break with me 
when you break with love.
 
Deborah:   She is sworn
to another, oh Lord. 
Under the torn and tattered edges or the wide
sweeping waves of the palm, 
I am your judge. The law 
endures.
 
God:    Who bears 
Jonathan’s robe to David? 
Who holds out your open palm? 
Of the steadfast land, the resounding sky,
the great bursts of the star hydrangea, 
mine are the laws.

Deborah Bacharach is the author of two full length poetry collections Shake & Tremor (Grayson Books, 2021) and After I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Collections, 2015). Her poems, book reviews and essays have been published in journals nationally and internationally including Poetry Ireland Review, New Letters, Poet Lore and The Writer’s Chronicle among many others, and she has received a Pushcart prize honorable mention. She is currently a poetry reader for The American Journal of Nursing, SWWIM, and Whale Road Review and a writing instructor, editor, and tutor in Seattle. Find out more about her at DeborahBacharach.com.

Morning Gift

It arrived 
like a drizzle of reprieve
on my desiccated thought.
No longer clamped by
envy or by anger,
I hardly know 
what transpired
in my dreams, wavering images
of a palace ground, steep-tiered
stone fountain gushing water down
to a sprawl of green where I walked.
I’d said no prayers, 
mercy flowed, it found me 
on its generous own.  

Andrea Potos is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry, most recently Her Joy Becomes (Fernwood Press), Marrow of Summer, and Mothershell, both from Kelsay Books.  Andrea’s work appears widely in print and online, most recently in The Sun, Spiritus, Portage Magazine, Poetry East, Potomac Review, Poem, and How to Love the World:  Poems of Gratitude and Hope (Storey Publishing).  She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.  

New Year’s Eve after the Holiday Away


The intermittent bark
of the collie next door,
Alexa playing Dvorak, Mahler.

Her takeout order called in:
Chicken Marsala.
The Chianti open and breathing.

For dessert, the easy chair.
Louise Erdrich’s 
“The Night Watchman”
waits on the end table.

Enter now the thermostat,
dipping from 68 to 60 to 55 to 49.

Enter her furnace ––
1987’s ironman without a pulse ––
her blood pressure, sole heat source.

Enter the emergency technician
just arrived from the heating company.
His clangs in the basement nailing
dollar signs on the cold walls.

Enter Martha, sister of Mary,
approaching from a corner
out of Luke’s gospel,*
apron speckled with flour,
a loaf still in the oven.
Solo cook, dishwasher,
Martha nods, knowing 

this woman lacks the company
of the Divine in the flesh.
Knows this woman
can’t hear Him telling her
none of this will matter.
	    	
*Luke 10:38-42	

Joan Bernard’s poetry has been published in The Main Street Rag, the Aurorean, Connecticut River Review, The North American Review, and others.She lives in Boston, MA and Thompson, CT.

The rabbis taught:  Four entered pardes.  Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Another, and Rabbi Akiva.  One looked and died; one looked and went mad; one looked and aspostasized; and one entered in peace and departed in peace.  –Tosefta Hagigah 2:2 (with variations in the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmud) 


1.
Four Entered Pardes

The journey took place in the study house
what comes next always comes later
madness, death, infirmities of age and hard living

First we went
we answered the seven riddles 
passed through the seven portals 
of the seven heavens etc
we knocked, entered 
stood, looked—the poet’s peeked is wrong—
we looked boldly. 
Was it Ezekiel’s flaming chariot we saw? 
Whatever.  We had come with a question: one God or many?
Akiva saw one.  I saw many. 
Azzai and Zoma, first timers, were bedazzled.

Like those who watch Fox and those who don’t
What you see is always what you already know.
You have brought it with you.  

2.
Questions for Another whose questions led astray:

What was the point of stepping into
the alleyways of Galilee
banish boys from their books 
sending them to learn 
practical skills rather than ideals
dreary dailiness in place of spiritual highs—

What could be more public than to 
mount your horse on the Sabbath
ride beyond the boundaries of the city 
into the hills of Galil—  

Was it to wish your dark despair on the world?

3. 

Zoma whose mind shattered 
on seeing the flaming chariot 
in flight like light
moving in every direction at once
never turning back
so that if he called, screamed even
wait for me, wait—
his cry—given physics—could travel 
only at the steady speed of slow sound
like the scream that emerged from that painting
and never reached God’s ears.


4.
#Another

About Another whom
the demagogues of 
the synagogues 
officially othered 
not for the usual separation 
that makes dehumanization possible. 

This othering erased a given name to
replace with a non-name 
now renowned for 
the dangers of Gnosis 
for the worst of what can happen. 
 
Worse than the 
ecstatic death of Zoma the 
madness of Azzai 
was this loss of faith
Another’s fate.
  
They needed a handle to
use as reference to
give deference to 
what everyone agreed was high learning:

Hashtag Another 
whose disciples continued walking behind him to benefit from his brilliance

Hashtag Another 
whose story served as warning about the dangers of asking the wrong questions  

Hashtag Another who inspired a poem, a novel, a series

Hashtag Another, the title of this song. 

In death, a disciple’s cloak claimed 
Another’s body for Jewish burial 
making sense of this ending.


5.  Four Women Enter PaRDes

Four women entered PaRDeS
considered the infamous chariot
the flaming wheels 
the fire-breathing dragons & tigers –

A hot rod? Peshat wondered. 
Where have we seen that before? Derash asked.
Mad Max, Peshat answered.  

Remez and Sod were already moving on  
toward the mystery they’d come for 
the story of creation.

Peshat & Derash hurried after. 

Pearl Abraham is the author of, most recently, American Taliban (Random House) and The Seventh Beggar (Riverhead, semi-finalist, Koret Intl).  Animal Voices, Mineral  Hum, a collection of stories in progress, was shortlisted for the 2018 McCarthy Prize in.short fiction.    

A Pew in the Forest



High on a mountaintop where few ever go, 
the autumnal forest rises in splendor  
like a cathedral accepting all kinds of seekers
inside its ancient pillars of trees pointed 
heavenward. And in a small nave of arched 
branches, I listen to the bird-choristers. 

The woodland incense of acorn drifts 
above the crunch of leaves, both whispered 
like prayers for the transcendence of being, 
and I know without a doubt something holy 
is afloat and afoot in this ephemeral space 
that will not look quite the same tomorrow. 

But today, sunlight on stained-glass leaves 
pulses a reminder of the deep red lifeblood 
flowing through the roots of the Spirit,
linking me to all creatures, revealing also
the golden tone of gratitude that is fused 
to the breath of the earth if we notice it.

I hear the numinous wood-laced hymns 
rebound the flamboyant flutter of a truth, 
which I know I must accept here, even as I 
pine for the one who has departed from me—
the truth that each of us must pass through 
the autumn before living forever in spring.

As a pilgrim humbled by a need to wonder, 
I take my pew—this moss-covered log—
sheltered beneath an old oak that’s become 
my friend, and I embrace the communion, 
knowing deeply, even in loss and sorrow, 
the certitude that it is well with my soul.

Danita Dodson is a poet, educator, and literary scholar. She is the author of two books of poetry, Trailing the Azimuth (2021) and The Medicine Woods (2022). Her poems have also appeared in Salvation South and the Tennessee Voices Anthology. Dodson is a native of Sneedville, Tennessee (USA), where she hikes in the hills of her ancestors and explores local history connected to the wilderness. Read more at www.danitadodson.com.

The Coventry Carol				

Herod the king, in his raging,
Chargid he hath this day
His men of might in his own sight
All yonge children to slay 


a paper boat
on an ocean
the weight of a baby
in your arms

out of the night
come angels 
wise men
and the death squad

the dream
the nightmare 
happen in the dark
hinterland of Christmas

ruthless power
strikes fast
strikes all
Childermas

inside information
flight
exile and biding time
the strategies of the escapee

who never imitates
the warlord tactics
who lets the level in the desert cistern
rise slowly, over thirty years

knowing new men of might
will smash in
achieve the kill 
provoke the overflow

Angela Graham is from Northern Ireland. In Wales she has had a long career as a film maker. She now divides the year between both places. Her collection of poetry, Sanctuary: There Must Be Somewhere was published by Seren Books in 2022 and her collection of short stories, A City Burning in 2020.