Amethyst Review

For the Lost Good
i.m. William Hart Strecker

Driving, grieving again for the lost good —
springtime, the trees at that point of flourishing
their magicians’ bouquets.  A few far-
away turkeys dark against the dark field.

------

Here and not here.  The note and
the rest.  The song and the silence after
and before.  Do you think this holiness just comes
out of nothing and goes back into nothing?

------

And if so, how magical is that?
Magicians’ bouquets . . . are we someone’s trick?
Those things that truly lodge in our hearts,
it seems only right that they should last.

------

Grieve, but try to remember we’re all
in the good that has drawn us toward itself.
Brothers and sisters, separated, find
each other without being introduced.

------

Everything is trading places with
everything else.  Don’t be afraid to lose. 
Keep your head above the clouds.  Alive 
or dead, what difference does that make to love?

Thomas R. Smith is a poet, teacher, and essayist living in western Wisconsin. His most recent books are a poetry collection, Medicine Year (Paris Morning), and a prose work Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival (Red Dragonfly).  He teaches at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, offering on-line classes available world-wide, and posts poems and essays at www.thomasrsmithpoet.com.  

Q&A with Kaz Dağları


Q: How does it feel to keep sitting still 
when everything around you constantly 
shifts, shatters, sinks?

A: It feels natural —
it's in my nature.
But that doesn't mean I don't shift, shatter and sink. 
It may not happen often and you may not see it,
but that doesn't mean it never happens.
Whatever happens in nature also happens in me
as I am part of nature, and nature is part of me. 
So yes,
it feels natural.

Q: How could I keep sitting still
in the face of all that comes and goes, how can I carry on
in the face of all that is lost?

A: By continuing to look
deeply into the nature 
of existence, until you realize
there is no coming and no going
and nothing is lost.
You don't need to carry any hope to carry on,
just continue to look deeply.
You also don't need to take my word for it —
see it for yourself
by continuing to look.

Q: How can I be like you?

A: You are
like me —
Notice yourself.
Notice me.
Notice our aliveness.
Notice that you, too, are part of nature —
part of me.
Notice the echoes
of our interconnectedness.
Notice yourself —
You are
(like) me.

Dila Toplusoy is an emerging writer and poet from Istanbul who writes in English, her second language. She holds a First Class Honours degree from University of the Arts London. Her work has been published by La Piccioletta Barca, Sky Island Journal, Sidekick Books and The Pandemic Post, among others. You can find her on Instagram as @dilaquis.

Kantak Shani
 
Surprise: your foot so capable in climbing
Grows red    grows pain   and stumbles on the hill path
Each step digs deep the thorn cannot be pulled
 
The other hikers try to twist it out:
Then rest      then herbal cures          and sound advice
And nothing changes agony not abstract:
A spine-shape sure    a shock that shock is lasting
 
Hill-summit there
Means shelter love and comfort    means the goal
(Or hides the next high summit further on)
 
Will you quit habitat of air and terra
 
Fail down the hill to ocean where no weight
Of body presses on the punctured flesh
Evade the gravity that widens wounds
 
Float now directionless       no goal but stasis
Abandon vertical      farewell to height
Let liquidly the thorn succumb     displacement
Propelled by inner motion not by outer            
 
And whirlpool-flung past homelands   sound or rescue
Step then on island    still some limping     tender
An island with no summit   shelter    comfort
But where your feet can learn again to stand.
 

Laura Sheahen has published poems in Four Way Review, Posse Review, and other journals in the US and UK. Her poetry book The Genie Smiles was printed in India. She lives in Tunisia.

Grace


An attendant on the worst flight I’ve ever 
taken—Orlando to Newark, alone, when my 
husband’s father was dying but I had to go

back to work—pointed at my stack of essays to
grade and smiled. I nodded, smiled back. So
she seated an unaccompanied child beside me.

Even the take-off was rough. A flock of gray-
clad nuns sorted through rosary beads across
the aisle, whispering, each window sealed with 

clouds the dun hue of their habits. We rose and 
dropped, rose and dropped. The child—a girl
with an Old Testament coloring book—cheered

every bump. Loudly. I clung to my principal-in-
the-classroom face, sure we were doomed, but
we lurched into New Jersey and thumped down: 

safe at home. At five, I kept flapping my arms
and trying to fly off the front steps, landing with
my toes stinging inside my shoes. So magic was

a bust. Grown, I still have trouble with physics— 
how counter-intuitive the momentum, the bright,
Windex-clear air under jets! My sister says she

doesn’t get nervous unless she can imagine a 
click-bait headline about the disaster about to
envelop her: be sure to count the Boy Scouts in

line before boarding anything. But all of these
are human inventions. Might as well listen to
the creek after a 3 AM rain, after its late night

shenanigans. Today’s sunlight is my late mom
hanging out sheets to dry and the wind is how she
flapped them first. I think that could be grace.

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.

Parole Denied
 
Eyes throw double daggers,
His mouth a razor slash,
Angled nose a switchblade,
For cutting any fool who stumbles close.
 
He smiles straight teeth,
Genetic chance, not tooth attention.
His wide grin is skeletal,
A rictus of desert-bleached bones.
 
He winks, “Save your pity,”
Sucks his teeth, “Ain’t no big thing.”
My eyes drawn to his I see tears frozen there,
Drops inked in flesh, forever etched.
 
He calls me back to a grotto I know,
An altar in shadow on swells of grass,
Mary, her son draped on her knee
Willing him to smile, to wink “It’s alright.”
 
Her tears, too, are frozen, and written there I read,
“Great as the sea is my sorrow”
Telling me should her tears fall, or his,
The wave of them would wash away the world.
 

David Cameron catches poems half-formed from an off-hand comment or a twist of phrase that makes him see things in a new light. He spent a long time as a Presbyterian pastor and then ended his paying career directing a Meals on Wheels program in western NC. He is now on loan to the trails and waterfalls of the area.

Communion of Saints II

				for my goddaughter, Sylvia

Today I wrote another letter 
           to my goddaughter dying…
                                  who we know now, is dying.

And I think about the theatre curtain,
           wine-like and substantial that cloisters 
                                  us underlings from the players.

I told her if she went before me
           I would pray to her and petition her 
                                  for a stageful of intercessions, 

for seventy times seven
           consecrated props. It will, of course, 
                                  not be that tall crimson pall

but a veil sheer and willowy 
           as wings, perhaps Irish lace
                                  latticed and lustrous,

so that now I feel her breath 
           against my face, her
                                  breath against my face.
                          

Fred Gallagher is Editor-in-Chief at Good Will Publishers, Inc., the parent company of TAN Books and Saint Benedict Press. He is the author of three memorial volumes on bereavement and three children’s books on character development. He has also authored a novel entitled The Light Hiding in Spindle. Fred has published poetry in Agora, Sanskrit, Cold Mountain Review, and is the 2023 winner of the Prime Number Magazine Annual Poetry Award. He resides with his wife, Kim, in Charlotte, N.C.

Homing

Life glides through us like seabirds through a mist
in search of land they’ve never seen before
but know each contour of and can’t resist
the urge that guides them through the corridor
of fog. To them, their island is a dream,
the sort of dream that draws a creature on,
though it may also be a mist. The scheme
is hidden in the flight, a pearl-gray swan.
The flock itself is made of mist, a skein
so vanishingly fine it’s hardly there,
not lilac, but a faint hint of vervain,
whose flower has the scent of empty air.
It leads the migrants, and the pilgrims too,
who take from it which north and south are true.

Dan Campion‘s poems have appeared previously in Amethyst Review and in Light, Poetry, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. He is the author of Peter De Vries and Surrealism (Bucknell University Press) and coeditor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (Holy Cow! Press). A selection of his poems was issued by the Ice Cube Press in July 2022: https://icecubepress.com/2021/10/01/a-playbill-for-sunset/

Don’t Rake the Leaves!

Let them lie on your front lawn.
They enrich the soil.
Butterflies can lay their eggs
on the crusty clusters outside
your window just as birds
feed and rest beneath
the wind-rustled cover
near the chipmunks and toads
sheltering under the same roof
in the woods all through
the rigor of winter.

And when it comes time for me
to leave, I will enter as a plant does,
growing roots into the earth
of the forest and join
the small, wide-eyed creatures
as I nurture them.

Janet Krauss, who has two books of poetry published, Borrowed Scenery, Yuganta Press, and Through the Trees of Autumn, Spartina Press, has recently retired from teaching English at Fairfield University. Her mission is to help and guide Bridgeport’s  young children through her teaching creative writing, leading book clubs and reading to and engaging a kindergarten class. As a poet, she co-directs the poetry program of the Black Rock Art Guild.

Sapphire


I have a treasure in my soul
given to me long ago
in words of bright, 
and literal blue

by a stranger who, 
told me that The Kingdom of God 
was a planet 
made of sapphire 
and that one day 
we would go there.

She said it, sharp and clear as fact,
directing her prophesy 
specifically at me. 

I remember -

though we only met briefly
how my friend pulled me away,
whispering, 
'Let's go.'

And so we turned our backs
and headed for the M3

And we stood thumbs up
hitchhiking for maybe forty years
and forgetting each other
and where we were going.

Everything about those days is hazy

But the sapphire planet still
shines
and I wonder 
if it is not in fact 
a star.

I know nothing about astronomy
but I have felt those azure rays
it seems, for an eternity.

And in my madness have bathed
in their light sometimes, 

wondering

fearful of gullibility
but lured back by beauty

So that I can now say
- sharp and clear as fact -
that something crystalline 
and true
now grows within me
reshaping 
with exquisite ordinances
the lost years
of my rebellion.

Valerie Maria Anthony is a London and Hampshire-based poet who has published In Oremus Magazine and Amethyst Review. She believes poetry can be an instrument of grace and takes joy seriously enough to look for it everywhere. She has many years of experience facilitating creative writing workshops in social care settings and is a trained visual artist.

Joy


              It stalks me, knows
where I am, follows me now,
 
can see me, a wolf at the edge 
              of the pine forest watching as I run

through panes of light,
              against the air that whispers 

through the trees, that wants
              to lift me up like a sail. 

Nothing scares me more
              than being unhinged 

but when a dove lands before me
              I stop short, caught breathless,

breaking open, torn from the trough
              of despair I feel so safe in. No choice

but to rise, and I am stretched out,
              devoured, expanding into the trees, this bird,

no I, only we,  untethered to me 
              and inside of everything

              mortal and earthbound.

Heather Swan‘s poems have appeared in such journals as Terrain, Minding Nature, Poet Lore, Phoebe, The Raleigh Review, Midwestern Gothic and Cold Mountain. She is the author of the poetry collection A Kinship with Ash (Terrapin Books), a finalist for the ASLE Book Award, and the chapbook The Edge of Damage ( Parallel Press), which won the Wisconsin Chapbook Award. Her nonfiction has appeared in Aeon, Belt, Catapult, Edge Effects, Emergence, ISLE, Minding Nature, and  The Learned Pig. Her book Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field (Penn State Press) won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. She teaches environmental literature and writing in Madison at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.