Amethyst Review

Driving Home from Tilghman Island in the Pouring Rain

Cloud-shackled sky. Field 
of winter-burnt wheat gleaming
in rain, seagrass bleached to brown. 
Power lines swaying. A lone 

farmhouse surrounded 
by wind-stripped trees. 
Through the cracked window, 
briny, pine-scented air. 

Static on the radio, a veil 
of rain on every road 
from here to home. The scent 
of incense, stale and musky, 

hangs in your hair and clothes. 
You lean forward in your seat, but
deceived by distance and dark, 
see no better than before.

The windshield wipers struggle 
and fail to keep pace 
with the storm. Tomorrow looms. 
Trash sputters across the road.

You think this drive will break you, 
leave you lonely in your loneliness, 
but I promise it is not too late 
for your sorrow-shackled heart.     
  
It’s only rain, and when it lifts, 
the world will open up 
and you will see that all, 
even the rain, is gift. 

Mary R. Finnegan is a writer and editor from Philadelphia. Her work has appeared in several places including The American Journal of Nursing, Lydwine, Catholic Digest, PILGRIM: A Journal of Catholic Experience. She is currently pursuing her MFA in poetry at The University of St. Thomas, Houston. 

Lifespring


All day up and down the shore the
	     wavelets
	     bubbles
	     swells
	     the crash of water-volume
	     and splash of froth
	     the salt-mist	
	     	     	  thrown
dampens the 
	     grasses
	     bay laurel
	     wild rose
	     goldenrod
	     and beech seedling
	     the ferns
	     the ferns
	     the ferns	
	     	     	  and so 
the soil drinks
	     the chipmunk drinks
	     the multitude in the soil drinks	
	     	     	  and 
	     when they are quenched, what remains
	     	     	  settles
	     works its way
	     	     	  gathers
	     to droplets
	     to seep through
	     to rivulet
	     to stream
	     to rush
	     to plunge
	     	     	  in joyful cataract
to the big water
	     returning yet again
to begin,

undiminished 
for all that
generosity.

Peter Taylor attends to inner landscapes in people and in words.  Deeply rooted in New York City and woodland, he and his husband now make their home on a Nova Scotia bluff overlooking the North Atlantic. 

A Subtle Art

The air took me quietly, a small
solar flare, found penchant 
misnomer, misguidance guiding me 
to the footfall where I lay softly 
at the feet of everything, which
includes nothing. No sacrament, 
no starry-eyed gaze, just wist and 
for a moment, peace. I stared 
and decided this was poetry,
the leaving and the returning and 
every inch of lichen growing beside
my window, pleading here with
quiet sighs and shadows. So write.
So speak it with your breath and 
record it in the asterisks, the meadow 
at half-moon. The forgetting, the
picture frame preservation. My eyes 
when they see the stars. Mother 
watching the ceiling at midnight,
preacher trying to feel God, 
horizon beckoning us to elsewhere.
If everything and nothing is home, 
then I belong nowhere but here, 
breathing inside and outside, 
uncertain and so very sure. 

Natasha Bredle is an emerging writer based in Ohio. She writes about what she thinks about, which is really too much for her poor brain. You can find her work in Aster Lit, Trouvaille Review, and Full House Lit, to name a few.

Instructions as Ars Poetica

	after Joy Harjo


To die we open our whole selves 
to that daybreak blaze. We wake and know 			
the bones we ate or snapped or sang 
will live but we will not. We may corner
a cave, crest a peak, breach a fault. Or
we may grieve our years or rail the blow.
Either way as we leave we say to our beloveds:
you who get to stay are blessed. You whom
I’ve loved all my life keep singing that hymn. 
It doesn’t matter who I am or how I’ve
fallen or what I bared. What matters 
is I spark the night for others to cross. 
What matters is that I, too, follow that fire.

Cheryl Slover-Linett (she/her) is a poet based in Santa Fe, NM. Her poetry is featured or forthcoming in Eunoia Review, River Mouth Review and Haiku Journaland she serves on the editorial team at High Desert Journal. In addition to writing, she leads wilderness retreats through Lead Feather, the nature non-profit she founded in 2008, and spends as much time as she can in the high desert mountains of northern New Mexico.

The Annunciation of a Dying Woman 

Gabriel undresses my tongue
a little more each night,
folds my worn words
into neat little squares,
places each gently in the heart 
of a cedarwood chest 
he carries under his wing.

Devils whisper dementia, but 

I know I go 
virgin tomorrow
unsullied by tense, 
unbroken by words,
save Father, Mother, and Son,
kissing the voice of an angel 
who might be a holy ghost
carrying me under his wing.

Mary Alice Dixon is a hospice volunteer who finds prayer in reading poetry to the dying. She is a Pushcart nominee whose work appears inGyroscope Review, Kakalak, Main Street Rag, moonShine review, Northern Appalachia Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Pinesong, three PSPP anthologies, and elsewhere. She lives in Charlotte, NC, frequently walking the Stations of the Cross. 

Miracles and Sorrows

poor death, so bored, so certain
unable to close his gaping jaw

waiting a lifetime 
with his one-trick mouth

while we cling to our delicate thread
dangling for a moment in sanctified light
mortals swinging from miracles to sorrows
and back again

Victoria Twomey is a poet and an artist. She has appeared as a featured poet at venues around NY, including the Hecksher Museum of Art, The Poetry Barn, Barnes & Noble, and Borders Books. Her poems have been published in several anthologies, in newspapers and on the web, including Sanctuary Magazine, BigCityLit, PoetryBay, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, The Tipton Poetry Journal and the Agape Review. Her poem “Pieta” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

watch and wait


the branching trees and their capillary networks
flush with nothing for many months.
you learn the words xylem, phloem. run them around
your mouth like magic rinse.

something so big can live, breathe, shed and then,
shuddering, come into a tender green
with the foul-smelling white flowers, or the stony
berries, or sway alone with papery leaves.

it’s easy to love a thing adorned. a thing in its spring
blush. but someone’s heart must pluck
at the sight of the barren fingers arcing against blue,
laced by ice and sugared with snow.

someone must mourn kore’s arrival, her petal train,
her pollen parade. gone, the ice. the burning cold.
hands outstretched instead of curved around
exothermic bundles deep in downy pockets.

someone must make do with the stray breezes,
the summer hail, the sky torn apart by rain.
count down the waxing days until the dark embrace
wraps round again, and frost unfurls its blankets.

agesander, i wait with you. two lovesick fools
struck dumb by the same song,
the same circle creaking along since the first dawn.
the rose garlands dry in our grasp,

but when she tires of embellishing the branches,
ornamenting with fruits and flowers,
it will be our turn to bedizen. to drape the world in
monochrome, to lay beauty to rest for a time.

a a khaliq is a poet and medical student from the midwest. she writes, in the tradition of kafka, to close her eyes. 

Afterlife

My death was not what I thought it would be.
I was expecting tunnels, light, a life
review, and dreading, actually, that thing
you hear about – you feel what everyone
was feeling every moment that you spent 
with them, and every shadowed motive comes 
to light. Instead I got into some sort
of ship, a vessel for a thousand souls.
There was a kind of river, but no need
of pilots, boatswains, ferrymen, or ghosts 
to guide the floating ventricle across 
the void. A holy wind enfolded us in warmth, 
a glow, and seemed to guide our unseen sails.
The bardo, bathed in halos, lay ahead
containing chambers in which each of us,
alone, would face a tilted scale upon 
which lay the iridescent feather that 
would weigh our worth, that mythic, colored plume
composed of all our memories and deeds,
all curling and unfurling on a quill,
the calamus our lifepath formed from birth
on earth to our arrival here. There was
no god or angel there to take our hearts 
and place them on the balance; we just knew
we had to do it for ourselves. And so 
I cupped my hands like one in prayer, felt
my spirit coalesce, a hand, a heart,
a life with just the heft to tip the scale,
the beam’s slow tilt toward eternity
excruciatingly vertiginous
as the feather brushed against me with
what seemed, from here, like dreams – a chance
encounter, lover’s face, a cruel word, 
a secret moment when a kindness shaped
a life, my friends, my enemies, the fears
I’d known. I felt the scale swing up and down
and realized the final test was this, 
the lesson I’d been learning all along:
to choose between the heaviness of fear  
and love that turns our souls to light. I made
my final choice; the tattered feather sank;
and, clothed in light, I started my ascent.

Cristina Legarda was born in the Philippines and spent her early childhood there before moving to Bethesda, Maryland. She is now a practicing physician in Boston. Her work has appeared in America magazine, The Dewdrop, Pensive, FOLIO, Dappled Things, HeartWood, Coastal Shelf,  The Good Life Review, and others.

Crows

Raucous ballet of dark birds, cries sawing cold air, flap
in staggered sequence, landing of one cue for the next

to take heavy flight in brief spaces between branches, feathers
shifting ebony to chrome, chorus of tarnished angels overhead,

miracle of somber, hoarse-voiced beauty, plaintive
threnody stinging me to tears as I turn to see you 

elbows folded on car roof, gaze lifted 
to those gold-and-silver birds.

Not every love is as you'd pictured. Not every gift 
comes wrapped and labelled with your name.

Carole Greenfield grew up in Colombia and lives in Massachusetts.  Her work has appeared in Red Dancefloor, Gulfstream, Women’s Words, Beltway Quarterly Review, and is forthcoming in Eunoia Review and Dodging the Rain.

Sugar Cube
 
“…if you could squeeze all the empty space out of all the atoms in all the seven billion people in the world, you could indeed fit them in the volume of a sugar cube.”: Marcus Chown in Ten Bonkers Things About the World.
 
 
We are mostly empty space. Squash us close
all seven billion of us – redbacksblackknees
yellowelbowsbrowneyeswhitetoes – and we’d fit in a cube
of sugar. A hollow woman, dressed in fingers and toes
 
I climb these hollow hills heaving with flowers.
Such beauty in empty. Sunlight on the tops of trees
manna gums bleached pink and everywhere
the smell of leaves. How many cubes for these hills?
 
Squeeze in the green gleam, the leaf-light, the fern’s
carnal curl. Slip in the soft bodies of the mushrooms,
the mountain ashes smooth-arming their white limbs
into the sky. Make room for this small stream, this one –
 
bubbling and slipping over the brown knees of stones
spanned by stream-stripped sun-bleached limbs of fallen birch
giant-bones left over from long ago
a forest of small births, the press of tiny deaths
 
mayflies and moss – to measure is moot.
Over the valley, a pair of rosellas dip and bank
a pinch of red, then of blue, opening now, now closing
make space for colour in our cube.
 
Nothing is lost, say the Upanishads –
fullness abides. I want to remember everything
these soft-spoken buds, the azaleas’ pink shouts,
your hand in mine, the sky leaning in.
 
 
 

Aparna Mitra lives in Melbourne with her husband and two children. Her poetry has twice won the My Brother Jack Awards and been shortlisted for the Fish Poetry Prize 2021. Aparna grew up in Calcutta, has a Masters in  Business Management and has worked in banking and in micro finance. Her most recent publication was in the Empty House Press. When not writing, you can find her trying to coax temperamental Indian tropical plants to bloom in her suburban Melbourne garden and tweeting @aparnamitra0.