Amethyst Review

Grace                           

Some might believe that grace is in the posture of this spine-straight, silent pilgrim. Some would argue it to be her smooth, sculpture-worthy patina. They’d say it’s like the vision of an angel cast in solid brass, the way it clashes with the orange and pink Dunkin’ Donuts sign on the wall behind her where she sits. Plastic sacks fixed at her feet like marble altar stones. Some would consider her grace to be the fact that she is unembarrassed by her dog-bed-of-a-woolen-coat. She is certainly a modest woman who would choose to cover herself with the navy blue of a man’s oversized giveaway. Others would suggest that grace is in her polite eyes that rarely blink, that never inspect her hands, never mind a rope of hair that gets in her face. Most would notice the elderly couple sipping coffee, the folks in line ready to order from the all-day breakfast menu. She is not interested in them, in food. She replies no, thank you to everything except the six sugars, one cream I place in front of her, which she does not touch. Truthfully, it is the onset of the shop’s closing when Grace will be swept into tomorrow, when Grace will have to stand, balance her bagged belongings, place one foot in front of the other to avoid a puddle, a pothole, a car, in order to find shelter on this night that promises a patient rain.

Judith O’Connell Hoyer’s 2017 chapbook Bits and Pieces Set Aside was nominated for a Massachusetts Book Award by the publisher of Finishing Line Press. Her first full-length book of poetry Imagine That is forthcoming from FutureCycle Press in March 2023. Judith’s poems can be found in publications that include CALYX, Cider Press Review, Southwest Review, The Moth Magazine (Irish), The New York Times Metropolitan Diary, and The Worcester Review among others. She and her husband split their time between Massachusetts and Rhode Island, USA.

An Invasion of Grapes

Shining box of glass surrounded,
waiting for a moment when the
gleaming screen might glance away...
Fumble in the paper bag and
draw out all the dusky globes,
detonating purple fragrance:
winking in conspiracy, they
throw the light of flashing spears,
smell of soil baked in the sunshine,
vines that link the earth to heaven,
sacred blood and muttered legends
spiralling around the centre.
Now they’re gone and crumpled paper
holds a breath of their invasion
(while the screen stares square and glassy -
all suspicion. Not suspecting.)

Katherine Spadaro was born in Scotland but has spent most of her life in Australia. She is married with two adult children. Her poems are typically short and focus on some everyday event or feeling; sometimes they have narrowly survived having all the life edited out of them. She is interested in the symbolism and impact of regular experience and how it is connected with spiritual truth. 

After a summer storm
 
At an open window
world made fresh
newly washed
in God’s best rain –
 
a cluster of drops
deck the sill
like miniature
snowless globes.
 
Trapped inside
a viscous dome
an insect thrown
on its back rocks 
 
to & fro, to & fro
to right its body
to free wings held fast
by force of water –
 
yet with a kind
of certainty
makes its way
to the sill’s edge
 
breaks through
the prison skin
and melded wings
spring apart.
 
Like a wordless prayer,
the creature flies away.
 

Annie Morris lives in SW London. Her poems have appeared in various online and print publications such as Minute Magazine, Allegro, Red Wolf Journal, Blue Heron Review, The Dawntreader, Shot Glass Journal and the anthology Myth & Metamorphosis (Penteract Press).

Four Perfect Figs
For Norann
 
Because she spies them on the tree,
because she knows he loves them,
she plucks and lays them on his desk
when he is out of the room.
 
The solid facts of the world are war,
pestilence, fear, and war,
yet no less solid is the fact
of perfect figs laid there.

Jane Greer founded Plains Poetry Journal, an advance guard of the New Formalism movement, in 1981, and edited it until 1993. She is author of the poetry collection Love like a Conflagration (Lambing Press, 2020), and her next collection, The World as We Know It Is Falling Away, will be published this fall, also by Lambing Press. She lives in North Dakota.

O, Hallowed Halo


Holy of holies, the hollow
within my soul, a black star’s 

bottomless hold of X’s & O’s.

A murder of crows and a murmur
of doves. Diamonds, coal. 

The bridge between poetry and prose. 

O love, where did you go? 
With fire, with snow?

With mangoes in mangrove groves.

With lovers, with levers, what’s left,
what’s right. To write—to write! 

With vixens, with voles. 

With rivers and sunlight, 
with iron, with gold. 

In ruthless truth what’s told unfolds. 

What to withhold between
the lines? In blue morning 

glory or moon vines, in birth,

in mourning. In heaven
on earth. The Biblical stories

of seven days and seven nights. 

With swords, with words. 
With syrinx song, with vanishing ink.

On ashes, on air. On violin strings, 

with rosin on horse-hair bows,
with harp-shaped wings, with stars, 

with electric guitars, with balsa airplanes,

on paper boats with triangle sails,
with angels, dust, detritus,

and the virulent virus, with venom

and vehemence, with trackless trains, 
with stop-gap measures, aluminum can 

pop-top trash or treasures in sand.

To the gist of it, to the crux.
To the hole in my gut, the sixth

sense, to scent-linked images

and seasonal verse, to the fingerless 
ring on my nightstand, a perfect 

O, the Fibonacci sequence 

of one and zero extending to infinity, 
to the coded hello of the cosmos. 

O, my soul. You are here. You are whole. 

Beth Copeland is the author of Blue Honey, 2017 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize; Transcendental Telemarketer (Blaze VOX 2012); and Traveling through Glass, 1999 Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Award. Her chapbook Selfie with Cherry is forthcoming from Glass Lyre Press. She owns Tiny Cabin, Big Ideas™, a retreat for writers.

Small Incidents of Synchronicity

A plate of shrimp goes sailing by. We see
them everyday, four or five times a day.
And then we see behaviors happen grouped
in types per day. Things like illegal turns
all happen the same day, like plates of shrimp,
in groups of four or five. I could track them.
There are problems, like pareidolia
and bias, to name two to make me a fool.
“There’s nothing supernatural,” my dad said.
But what if they’re real in natural ways? Patterns
in some kind of substance? It seems amazing,
the way life always serves these platters on time,
like snacks at some reality soiree,
like cells pulsing on a bigger path than mine.

Tom Bauer is an old coot who did a bunch of university and stuff. He 
lives in Montreal and plays board games.

The Silence Inside

I want to write about silence
but it is never silent 
inside this blue house.

Motorcyclists rev 
their engines,
my laptop grinds away 
at some obscure function,
and the refrigerator belts
another work song. 

The house tells me it will 
grant my wish,
but only if I remove 
all of its contents,    
including myself. 

Margaret Coombs is a poet and retired librarian from Manitowoc, Wisconsin, USA, the city of her birth, located on the western shore of Lake Michigan. Her first chapbook, The Joy of Their Holiness, was published in 2020 by Kelsay Press under the name Peggy Turnbull. She now uses her birth name as her pen name. Recent poems have appeared in Silver Birch Press, Bramble, Three Line Poetry, and Verse-Virtual.  She occasionally blogs at https://peggyturnbull.blogspot.com/

.

Presentiment

Slip from a warm bed
dark in the night and all
the house still sleeping
draw back a curtain on
 
the garden stained with
street light expectation
of some revelation
disclosure of small secrets
 
trusted to no one else
yet only stillness
maybe a breath of wind
to agitate deep bushes
 
at most a stalking cat
sound of a car door on
the nearby street nothing
remarkable by daylight
 
nobody else to share
the privacy of this small
silence which sustains
your premonition
 
around hidden meaning
fancy of secret knowledge
wrapped in such scraps
as you alone have seen.

Tony Lucas is retired from parish ministry but continues work of editing and spiritual direction.  His poetry has appeared widely, on both sides of the Atlantic, and past collections Rufus At Ocean Beach (Stride/Carmelyon) and Unsettled Accounts (Stairwell Books) remain available.

Catharsis & Kenosis: The Sacred Art of Writing

To create art is to express something of what lies in the soul, conveying the spirit onto paper. The process of writing has an inherent spirituality, as the writer pours themselves into their words. Writing is a way to share what inspires us. We may write with the goal of inspiring others in turn- encouraging readers not to give up, to know that they are not alone, to pursue their passions, and to positively change the world. 

Being a writer is a vocation, beyond the writer themselves. In writing, one has the power to teach, to enlighten, which isn’t one-sided, but a collaboration. Teaching allows the teacher to learn, too, to be humbled by students, and strive towards a higher purpose, still. The act of sharing knowledge is an act of self-giving, spiritual generation, bringing new learners into the fold, teaching them how to carry the torch forward. Writing is never stagnant, always in flux, welcoming others to reimagine the world, so that there is constant artistic creation, perpetual responses ignited by the original spark. It’s why we return to reading classics, finding inspiration in works by the likes of Jane Austen or Shakespeare, continuing to react to them in our own inventive ways.

What is sacred is transcendent. Written works transcend time and place, reaching across the distances. If there wasn’t something sacred about writing, it would be easy to simply let it be, without allowing it to breathe and transform, to grow ever more radiant in giving it a life beyond one’s notebooks in a drawer. While taking what can be daunting steps to disseminate our words, we can transcend our human fears. Because writing is so personal, so close to the heart, being an extension of the inner spirit, it can be difficult to share. We may be inhibited by self-doubt, rejecting our own work before it has been read by another. However, the spirit that drives the writing process often wins, the transcendent rising above the corporeal, with the need to help, to teach, to share, triumphing over fear. 

Writing that endures is writing that is empathetic, appealing to the human heart in all its stages of life, in any time or place, because what is sacred is given fully, unconditionally, from the self, the epitome of agape, sacrificial, love, so that even when it hurts to write, reliving sorrow and pain, wounds are mended. As the heart breaks, it becomes stronger and richer, deepened with love. Understanding is the root of the love, and the heart that breaks knows suffering, feeling for others. Never solitary, writing takes on meaning in new ways by passing through other hands, touching other hearts. It may be cathartic, releasing emotions helping us to heal ourselves, but ultimately, it is a form of kenosis, emptying the self to heal others. Writing fills the empty vessel, the blank page, with light, shining not only to reflect what’s within us as individuals, but for others to see, and find their way, too.

Kathryn Sadakierski’s writing has appeared in Agape Review, Critical Read, Halfway Down the Stairs, Literature Today, NewPages Blog, Silkworm, Songs of Eretz, and elsewhere. Her micro-chapbook “Travels through New York” was published by Origami Poems Project (2020). She holds a B.A. and M.S. from Bay Path University.

Timing


We each one have our own
particular idea of at what hour,
say, what minute, the Resurrected
roused and stretched, scratched 
and blinked, hard, twice, 
and arose.

From the dead.

We some have it daybreak
when He soldiers forth, a squirrel, 
a Middle Eastern squirrel, the tiny, 
witless witness of the day the world
changed. God loved one squirrel 
that much.

We some have Him shake off 
the shroud like silky cobwebs 
in the middle of the night, feel dew 
deeply in the darkness as He first fills, 
refills, lungs. Feet loving wet grass,
toes happy. The whole world fast asleep.

(The book does say: 
resurrection of the body.
Resurrecting any other bloodless thing
is of no interest to me whatsoever.)

So, we will have body, 
if not bawdy, boldly please.
Not only toes, but turban hair, cramp, 
wrinkle, myrrh perfume, a drench.

There are of course others 
have Him rising later
—six-fifteen, six-thirty – 
there approaching dawn, the only 
one who sees him, stumbling home,
a drunk, who does not know he’s 
there, who does not know He’s there.

That is who God comes to,
dripping glory on damp sand.
But at what hour, 
seen or gone unnoticed, 
that’s more difficult to say.

Linda McCullough Moore is the author of two story collections, a novel, an essay collection and more than 350 shorter published works. She is the winner of the Pushcart Prize, as well as winner and finalist for numerous national awards. Her first story collection was endorsed by Alice Munro, and equally as joyous, she frequently hears from readers who write to say her work makes a difference in their lives. For many years she has mentored award-winning writers of fiction, poetry, and memoir. She is currently completing a novel, Time Out of Mind, and a collection of her poetry. www.lindamcculloughmoore.com