Amethyst Review

Thanksgiving
 
When Jupiter’s the light you see first
as it blurs the cinnamon stars
 
and feet orbit this living room floor
as you peek at a fig hearted sky,
 
and sigh at persimmon striped lines
as acute western blue feathers by,
 
say Grace for the magnificent now
as apples disappear on the sill
 
then set into  honey crowned night
as a cardamom moon rises full –
 
Who says you’ve given or taken your fill?

Kerstin Schulz is a German-American writer living in Portland, Oregon. Her work can be found in River Heron Review, HerStry, The Bookends Review, Raft, Relief, Montana Mouthful, and Cathexis Northwest Press, among other publications. She is also the winner of the PDXToday 2023 Poetry Contest.

Praise Bread
 
—after Jeanne Lohmann

I learned as a child that one 
of the many names of God is bread.
Our pastor broke in half 
a round loaf, said, This is my body,
broken for you. Communion’s silver trays,
doll-sized glasses of grape juice,
doll-sized crusts of bread passed hand
to hand. Do this in remembrance of me. 
Consider the many names of bread: 
croissant and tortilla and challah 
and naan. Baguette, lavash, injera. 
Consider cornbread, banana bread, 
buttermilk biscuits. Consider rye 
and pumpernickel, cracked wheat 
and white, lemon cake, pound cake.
Consider the cinnamon toast your mother 
made for you when you were sad. 
Consider aroma of baking bread, firmness 
of crust. Consider how each day
the baker rises early to her work,
the bread, kneaded and shaped, 
baked fresh, offered to the hungry,
taken, like praise, daily into one’s mouth. 

Bethany Reid’s stories, essays, and poems have recently appeared in One Art, Poetry East, Quartet, Passengers, Adelaide, Kithe, Descant, Peregrine, and Catamaran. Her fourth full-length collection of poems, The Pear Tree, won the 2023 Sally Albiso Award from MoonPath Press and is due out this winter. She lives in Edmonds, Washington, and blogs about writing and life at http://www.bethanyareid.com.

Blessed Are The Lowly
 
Give me the strength to be as weak as God;
Lead me to love as though I were
A crucifix in an empty church.

The might of kings lies buried in the sod;
The meek alone will last beyond the earth.
Give me the strength to be as weak as God -
Lord, lead me to love as though I were.

Give me the sense of soft and little-pawed
Dark creatures in the corners of the world,
Who creep inside to die without a word.
Give me the strength to be as weak as God;
Lead me to love as though I were
A crucifix in an empty church.

Maggie Palmer has recently graduated from the University of Dallas with a B.A. in English and Classical Philology and currently lives with her family in Fort Cavazos, Texas. Her work has appeared in such magazines as Blue Unicorn, The Lyric, Grand Little Things, and Mezzo Cammin.

All Our Houses are the Same House


All our stories are the same story: it
gets dark and we light fires and lamps.
Seeds sleep under the snow. No one

really dies. Our grandparents come
out to meet us at the end of a long
sidewalk in the shade of tall bushes.

They fall to their knees, glad-crying
but then we wake. Except one day, 
we don’t wake. In the wind, the wind— 

that’s where everyone is, riding the
updraft, circling like the year’s last 
leaves. The door blows open and

no one knows why. But that’s why.
Nobody’s hung Christmas lights yet
but up and down the street, each

window goes yellow in the dusk. The
creek is slow and quiet. Seeds sleep 
under the snow. No one really dies. 

In these days, we’re clothed only
with love. Someone is leaving and
someone is coming to the door. All

our houses are the same house. What 
an honor to wait in it, listening. What 
an honor to turn on the stove and cook.
 

Christine Potter lives in New York’s Hudson River Valley.  Her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Sweet, Mobius, Eclectica, Kestrel, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Fugue, and been featured on ABC Radio News. She has poetry forthcoming in The Midwest Quarterly. Her time-traveling young adult novels, The Bean Books, are published by Evernight Teen.

Spun Glass, Harp Strings, and Theology 


Each will weave and intertwine
like silk, ice, sand, and even you—
working backwards from one great line. 

That’s because the images shine
like moonlight, money, and white hot glue—
each will weave and intertwine. 

Rhymes, like leather, must be fine: 
water words to draw, wooden ones to hew
working backwards from one great line. 

What’s appearing is true, divine—
within the echoes find something new:
each will weave and intertwine. 

Nature helps, a tree, a vine,
writing in a silent room, with a view,
working backwards from one great line. 

By the end, each word a sign, 
when it’s time to start anew,
each will weave and intertwine,
working backwards from one great line.

Isaac James Richards is a poet, essayist, and graduate student in the BYU English Department. He has won four poetry contest awards and five essay contests. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Irreantum, BYU Studies Quarterly, Y-Magazine, and Literature and Belief. He is also a contributing editor at Wayfare Magazine. He can be reached via his personal website: https://www.isaacrichards.com/  

Diamond Time

That evening moment when a slant of sun
bedazzles little waves with points of light
creates across the lake a belt of stars
anticipating the oncoming night.

This earth, less than a mote of cosmic dust,
becomes within our human point of view
the center of a universe of thought,
its gravity uniting me with you

in temporary selves somehow alive.
The carbon atoms now called you and I
will shatter, scatter through unmeasured time 
to reignite as diamonds in the sky.

Barbara Loots resides in a historic neighborhood in Kansas City, Missouri. Her poems have appeared in magazines, textbooks, and anthologies for more than 50 years.  Her three collections can be found on Amazon. She serves on the Advisory Board of The Writers Place. 

Samhuinn

I imagine in the fire’s flames
those sepia or line drawn faces
distorted by time, anamorphic,
called from forgotten places

to whisper through the hot smoke
and tousle our soot-flecked hair
to remind us of our inheritance
in faint voices lingering there.

The great tribe gathers to celebrate
some long forgotten rite:
the saining of the precious hearth,
an offering to the night,

or the mumming and the guising,
parading the scapegoat’s head,
praying to sacred ancestors
and conversing with the dead.

But these are more enlightened times:
and the worship of ancient bones
is marked with Coke and hot dogs
and messaging on phones

and a smug new generation
who know what they are worth
and children sucking plastic pap
who sacrifice the earth.

Yet the embers of tradition
still lie within the ashes:
we still have time to say a prayer
before the whole world crashes,

before our fire is starved of life
and in that dying light
we are drawn towards the darkness
and everlasting night. 

We sleep again, and hope to wake 
and find the nightmare’s gone,
and once again we have a world
to build our dreams upon -

but that depends on being a tribe
relying on each other,
who live content with what they have
and respect the earth, their mother.

Jeff Gallagher’s poems feature in Rialto, Acumen, The High Window and The Journal among others. He has had numerous plays published and performed nationwide. He was the winner of the Carr Webber Prize 2021. For many years he taught English and Latin. He also appeared (briefly) in an Oscar-winning movie.

My Ghosts

 
Could my own rosaries, en route to heaven,
so consecrate the chair I used to pray?
Would my own solecisms lighten, leaven
the speech of children continents away?

Will I so overshadow part
of time and space, a corner of a heart,
almost to walk where I am wanted?
Almost to haunt as I am haunted?

Maggie Palmer has recently graduated from the University of Dallas with a B.A. in English and Classical Philology and currently lives with her family in Fort Cavazos, Texas. Her work has appeared in such magazines as Blue Unicorn, The Lyric, Grand Little Things, and Mezzo Cammin.

So Much Evidence

	All the way to heaven is heaven ~ St Catherine of Siena

Let’s say Catherine was right – 
just for today, let’s try believing it,
all the way heaven.  Let’s set aside 
all those negative vibes, put our energies
into living simply, planting trees and
milkweed, feeding watching listening

to birds – living in harmony will all
our nonhuman kin.  All the way 
just might be heaven IF we could 
manage that tectonic shift –
could become neutral as nature,
taking it all in stride – death 

and grief – accept that our time 
on Earth will be brief yet all 
the way heaven IF we could learn
to fly hawk-like in ever-widening
circles, and be part mild part wild.
But you scoff and say,

	Look at all the horror and terror
	along the way.
I say yes, it’s true, but note who
is to blame, and let the flame of 
the beauty of things (nature) light
your way – all the way heaven.

Seas and mountains,
eagles and gulls,
rainforests and Earth’s three poles.
Behold the beauty, the intrinsic
glory – is it not heavenly?
So much evidence, let us 

just for today be convinced 
Catherine was right. And IF
(when) the owl calls out tonight,
accept her as gift, and lift 
up your arms to embrace 
heaven in this very time and place.

Diana Woodcock is the author of seven chapbooks and five poetry collections, most recently Holy Sparks (2020 Paraclete Press Poetry Award finalist) and Facing Aridity (2020 Prism Prize for Climate Literature finalist). A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a Best of the Net nominee, she is the recipient of the 2022 Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award (for her sixth full-length manuscript, Heaven Underfoot), the 2011 Vernice Quebodeaux Pathways Poetry Prize for Women (for her debut collection, Swaying on the Elephant’s Shoulders), and the 2007 Creekwalker Poetry Prize. Currently teaching at VCUarts Qatar, she holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University, where she researched poetry’s role in the search for an environmental ethic.

Give Me

Give me a cool October morning
meant for long pants and a sweatshirt…

Give me a yard full of October leaves…

Give me the steady sound
of the leaf rake, the spring rake,
the small-headed rake for those
narrow spaces between stone and shrub…

Give me the time to rake those leaves
into a funeral pyre of the fallen…

Give me a wooden match to strike
and light this pyre into the incense of autumn…

Give me the wisdom to know
whether I’m burning summer
or welcoming winter…

Give me the leisure to look up
and feel the final shade of unfallen leaves…

Give me the mindfulness to thank them
for their arrival,  their being,
how they would bejewel themselves
with caught rain, and their leaving…

Give me the patience not to begrudge
their leaving, not to sigh when they
inevitably let go to remind me to do the same…

Give me that sensation of warm sweat
that beckons me to doff the sweatshirt
and remember summer…

And when winter comes…

Give me a woolen cap, warm gloves,
dry boots, and strong back to shovel…

Give me, too, a neighbor with a snowblower…

Give me another neighbor
who will ask into the blizzard
if anyone wants a just baked brownie…

Give me later a mug of cocoa or coffee
or tea or perhaps a glass of Jameson…

Give me a comfortable chair,
my feet on the ottoman by the fire…

Give me the crackle of that fire
while I sit and stare and think…

Give me a good book by that fire,
let me gather its words and turn its leaves slowly…

Give me the wind to buffet the shudders,
sculpt the snow, and move my eyes
from the word to the shadow…

Give me the solitude of darkness…

Give me the courage to hope
into that darkness and dream of leaves…

I will not, Mr. Thomas, rage against the dying of the light –
not yet – not during this solstice season
of cold and night, not during these days of slanting sun
and branches remembering the life to come.

John Hopkins has been an English teacher for forty-two years. He was the New England Association of Teachers of English (NEATE) poet of the year in 2008. John’s poetry has appeared in Commonweal, Saint Anthony Messenger, The National Catholic Reporter, The  Leaflet, Sr. Melannie Svoboda’s blog, “Sunflower Seeds,” and Father Timothy Joyce’s book Celtic Quest. For the past six years, John has been a Benedictine Oblate affiliated with Glastonbury Abbey in Hingham, Massachusetts. He loves to read, write letters, tramp the Blue Hills, and play pickleball with Kerry, his amazing wife, and mother of their wonderful children: Kate, Danny, and Brian. In February of 2021, John’s first book of poems, Celtic Nan, was published, and in February of 2023, his second book, Make My Heart a Pomegranate was published. You can reach John at brotherjohnnyhop@gmail.com.