New Writing Engaging with the Sacred
Field Workings – Abbotskerswell, Devon
Found Flowers – Germander Speedwell, Christow, Devon
Found Flowers – Tufted Vetch, Lydcott, Devon
Julie Sampson’s collections are Tessitura (ShearsmanBooks, 2014) and It Was When It Was When It Was (Dempsey & Windle, 2018 ). Her poems are published in a variety of magazines, including recently in Molly Bloom, Projectionist’s Playground, Otoliths, Poetry Village and High Window. Her website is Julie Sampson
After the Snowstorm The snowman my neighbor built has melted, the weather tricks me with its sunshine and chill breeze, two squirrels play outside my window, they take turns in a dance like chase. I want to frolic outside in my pajamas, attend a concert with five hundred guests, engage political disagreements without violence. I want to hug my neighbors and my friends. I call my friend; his mother died from Covid, his pain is raw, his voice is trembling still. We chat about movies, books, our losses, the strength to shine when the world is frozen still. And as I wait my turn for the vaccine, pandemic winter melts into spring.
Yevgeniya Przhebelskaya has held a variety of paid and volunteer jobs in the education field, including teaching introductory college classes and facilitating poetry workshops. Yevgeniya’s poems have been published in Time of Singing, Page and Spine, First Literary Review-East, Ancient Paths, and other print and online publications, and were nominated for the Pushcart Prize two times. Check out more of her poems at ypoetry.weebly.com
On the Rue du Bac Begin by the Quay d’Orsay And entering the quartier First a broad and straight few blocks Then things start to narrow Press of the older city Start to bias leftwards Steady like a scythe blade You couldn’t see the end of the long Street’s shaded inverted Trajectory always hid Its faces your future a few Minutes ahead askew Until you sighted a crossing of roads Ahead and here’s a doorway You’re behind Le Bon Marché Nuns are streaming in A sudden phenomenon And seeming magnetised you join Their subterranean movement The shopping day steps on In its interiority Courtyard and chapel quietly When seated something is let free Under the colour of Mary And Catherine Labouré
Martin Potter (https://martinpotterpoet.home.blog) is a poet and academic, and his poems have appeared in Acumen, The French Literary Review, Eborakon, Scintilla, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Poetry Village, and other journals. His pamphlet In the Particular was published by Eyewear in December, 2017.
Cleaving Light
sun blinks above a band of dove-grey
cloud. descending to an early horizon, she turns
her strange manifesting on me.
streams glint through the V of maple boughs;
leaves flicker at a value approaching zero.
I am in her beam,
angled for the downcast eyes
of Mary, for Bryn Celli Ddu at solstice,
for the canyon growing deep
and marked behind me—held
by what I cannot grasp. frequencies dance my eyes
—I am what she makes—real/
eluding, the hawk now drifting.
her tilt to wane skimming my brow,
my muttered stay, as sky fills up with night.
Kathryn Knight Sonntag is the author of the poetry collection The Tree at the Center (BCC Press, 2019). She has recent and forthcoming poems in Psaltery & Lyre, Abstract Magazine, The Curator, and the anthology Blossom as the Cliffrose (Torrey House Press, 2021). She works as a landscape architect in Salt Lake City, Utah. www.kathrynknightsonntag.com
We Measure by the Second-Hand Circling tick of breaths in / breaths out water rising / receding the way young children gather daisies to fashion into necklaces, into crowns later pick petals off one by one by one sing riddles, make up love’s depths predicted by flower stamen, pistil, thin leaves arcing around the tender yellow button praise of tulips, of a lily’s soft unfurling the butterfly/ bee/ hummingbird the nectar the sweet buzz and hum a wing / a whir a pearl in a nest of moss the precarious hope of an egg * late May / early June from greening leaves curling open moth larvae on the end of thin silk threads hung like hair ribbons filaments shimmering in dusty light * We want to feel the wondrous the way water leaves us evaporates into clouds , into air the way a bird’s small body curves into feathered flight
Molly Fuller is the author of the full-length collection For Girls Forged by Lightning: Prose & Other Poems (All Nations Press) and two chapbooks Tender the Body (Spare Change Press) and The Neighborhood Psycho Dreams of Love (Cutty Wren Press). Her work has appeared in Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence, New Poetry from the Midwest, 100 Word Story, NANO Fiction, and Bellingham Review. She is the recipient of a 2020 Artist Residency from both Vermont Studio Center and Wassaic Project. Fuller is the winner of the Gris Gris2020 Summer Poetry Contest. You can find her on Instagram and twitter @mollyfulleryeah.
Seven of Pentacles “But release me from my bands with the help of your good hands: gentle breath of yours my sails must fill or else my project fails which was to please.” I take my face in my own hands and stare right into it: the jawline sharper, the hairline lower, the forehead not yet creased by the hard years from which I’ve only now emerged and which I did not know I’d set in motion and say, firmly, “A fallow field is not a failure,” but I do not hear me, poor thing; I am not in the habit of hearing anything but the too-long pauses after I say I love him before I hear it back. I pleased and I pleased and I pleased and I still watched the project fail—no, fallow—the project fallowed, the field dry and cracked for the season, but I am free of its burden for good.
Jacob Budenz is a queer writer, multi-disciplinary performer, educator and witch with an MFA from University of New Orleans and a BA from Johns Hopkins University. The author of PASTEL WITCHERIES (Seven Kitchens Press 2018), Budenz has fiction and poetry in Slipstream Press, Wizards in Space, Entropy Magazine, Pussy Magic, and more, as well as anthologies by Mason Jar Press, Lycan Valley Press, and Mad Scientist Journals. You can follow Jake’s work on Instagram (@dreambabyjake), Twitter (@jakebeearts), or the internet beyond (www.jakebeearts.com).
A Second House Fall’s apple crop from a diseased tree in the front yard grounded, munched noiselessly by deer who easily leap our picket fence as though it were an invitation Moles in the pasture unseen push up mounds of dirt in their busyness, building felt pathways for their blind lives Winter rains near doubled leave flooded fields for ducks and snow geese to visit on their seasonal flights to somewhere south of instinct, our name for our ignorance If hunger were entitlement we’d not be living this tarted-up world-ache preferring fantasy to ordinary life insuring perpetual discontent The house we build in thought always adding on, outgrowing us falls away to footloose truth becoming a second house a flat-land hut, really a single room, no door, all windows An earth observatory the whole world comes to visit with room-sized songs and stories A second house waits patiently within our discontent marking timelessness before (excusing incongruity) during and after, in -lessness for notice it does not depend on Falling away are tundra, arctic ice coral reefs, hammerhead shark, giant sequoia, Monarch butterfly, their newly fluid forms merging their stories come to us in hearing already heard out of time, before and since we thought ourselves entitled
Don Brandis is a retired healthcare worker living quietly near Seattle. His poems have been published in Leaping Clear, Free State Review, Neologism Poetry Review, Poetry Quarterly and elsewhere.
Praying in the Doorway Pause at the threshold, in the space between. The harried will curse and push past. Let them go. This is the Janus space, facing both ways. Here past converses with future. Here you have yet to say, “I will.”
Jeffrey L. Taylor never received higher than a C in English
throughout school and college. Through articles in recreational computer
journals, he learned to write with rhythm and conciseness, often too
concise. In poetry, that is not a problem. Around 1990, poems began waking him in the night. He now writes in the day.
Concerning the Angels It is a step too far, to see the contemplation and the fall of such as these, that knew no pity but intellectual grace. It is not an issue of purity in the fading light, the ghosts of such as might have been. There is no touch so close as water or sweetness heightened in the cold. Even now I cannot speak there is too deep a botch in things.
Adam Walters is 24 years old and originally from Marple in Greater Manchester. He completed a BA in English literature at the University of Cambridge in 2017, with a dissertation on work of Wallace Stevens. He then completed an MA at Durham University in 2018 with a dissertation on the work of Hart Crane.
Peter Keep him safe oh You Who Save, my son up on the barricades who took my ‘60’s stories home and stands against the gloriers in the standard hate the usualness the greed he could read before he walked and now he marches balking not an inch at 6 feet tall a target unrepentant and I worry. Should I have spent those childhood walks imparting Shakespeare or Godot not Abbie Hoffman and Rousseau he stands above me in so much more than height he’s riding on a bus tonight to meet equality’s enemies at some counter- demonstration, for safety asked me not to come. Stand by him exonerate me too who adores him more than nation cause or You.
Wayne-Daniel Berard, PhD, teaches Humanities at Nichols College, Dudley, MA. He publishes broadly in poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. His poetry chapbook, The Man Who Remembered Heaven, received the New Eden Award in 2003. His non-fiction When Christians Were Jews (That Is, Now), subtitled Recovering the Lost Jewishness of Christianity with the Gospel of Mark, was published in 2006 by Cowley Publications. A novel The Retreatants, was published in 2012 (Smashwords). A chapbook, Christine Day, Love Poems, was published in 2016 (Kittatuck Press). His novella, Everything We Want, was published in 2018 by Bloodstone Press. A poetry collection, The Realm of Blessing, was published in 2020 by Unsolicited Press.
Amethyst Review 