Amethyst Review

In the Shrine of Margaret Clitherow


Outside there was always blood,
Black jewels shackled to the stalls,
Flies hovered drunk
On the decaying flesh and cleavers
Swooped like falcons,
Flashing in the sun.
She grew in blood,
Bore children to the stink of it,
She knew bone shatters and the soft flesh breaks,
Saw the thin line between life and death,
Made friends with it.

The blood river bore her to an older faith.
She rode it lightly,
Walking from guest to guest,
Greeting her neighbours,
A mock to those who seek them, and she smiles,
Always seeing blood in the corner of her eye.

Taken she will not plead
For no offence, dismisses evidence they got
Between an apple and a stick,
No drooping head, no penitential pleas,
Looks in their eyes and they
Like gasping hounds scent quarry, smell the blood.

Prison confines her body, frees her soul.
She rocks the child within her womb, 
Making her shroud,
Each stitch a step upon the road to death,
Fashions a shift just like an eager bride,
And hurries, seeing a familiar friend,
Eager for Lady Day.

The feast is Crucifixion Day that year,
No shift allowed; defiance must be shamed.
Frightened by certainty, they strip her bare,
But cannot kill.
Hired beggars place the stones under her back,
 A dull domestic door to bring on death.
Pile on the weights,
Bones snap,
Lungs fail.
Blood flowing on the cobbles 
Wipes out their names,
Carries hers down the years.

Helen Jones gained a degree in English, many years ago from University College London and later an M.Ed. from the University of Liverpool. She is now happily retired and spends a lot of her time writing and making a new garden. 

Unweaving the Veil


She, a tamarisk tree, still has russet bark, 
a sapling barely capable of shade. 

Yet she knows the verses her mother has spoken
over her, teaching the moral way to handle seed.

Seed is precious, Anne says. Generation
a dangerous affair, requiring the utmost care, 

safeguarded in veiled ritual. These expectations
clothe the young Nazarene, tight Tanak threads 

that have woven her world. 
Then the angel came. 

Maria Cosway and Joos Van Cleve paint
Gabriel gesturing with one hand to the sky,

the other one clasping a staff.  
But that’s not what she sees. 

The messenger of God unweaves, gently
reaching for the cloak that has contained her

since birth. Gabriel teases patterns apart,
tight grids unraveling. She’s now a newborn, 

unswaddled, limbs flailing in fibril mess. 
A universe crashes, planets and stars

scatter like shot marbles. Favor? How 
can this be? Under the weight of divine shade,

she bends down to see pearls at her feet,
her cambium curving in a new direction. 

Melanie Weldon-Soiset’s poetry has appeared in Geez, Vita Poetica, and Bearings Online. A 2021 New York Encounter poetry contest finalist, Melanie is a contemplative prayer leader, #ChurchToo spiritual abuse survivor, and former pastor for foreigners in Shanghai. Feel free to sign up for her poetry and prayer newsletter at melanieweldonsoiset.com.

Gabriel

The Father sent me, so of course I went.
The planet and the village both were small.
I was to tell her of the Lord’s intent
to mitigate the sickness of the Fall.

I saw her praying, and she seemed to me
an ordinary, not-so-pretty girl.
But when she spoke she seemed an almond tree
about the time its tender blooms unfurl.

When I’d arrived, I was to say, “Fear not.”
But when I’d had my say, she looked at me
with eyes that held me rooted to the spot.
“I am a leaf,” she said. “He is the sea.”

Amazed by these few words, I took my leave,
and marveled how the Father knew his child.
Yet, curious, I hung about the eave
to see her candor. Then she knelt and smiled.

John J. Brugaletta has eight volumes of his poetry in print, the latest of which is One of the Loaves Was Yours. He is professor emeritus at California State University, Fullerton, where he taught courses in the works of C. S. Lewis, Shakespeare, Dante, and Homer.

Annunciation

You’re nothing and nobody, naturally—
downcast, inconspicuous as befits
your station, flying under the radar—

then, no particular day, there’s a flutter,
a flash, an advent.  Because of you,
the Big Man’s chair will get tipped over
with the Big Man himself in it.

You can say “No way,” or “Let it be,”
or both.  But you will be remembered
always, as the head of what followed.

I never thought to start a line of kind
children, change the mood in a hall
by standing up to speak quietly,
help carry a stretcher out of the woods.

Then, a hawk’s shadow passed over
as I walked in the Ossipee highlands.
I thought, “Gabriel?”  And I called,

“Not happening, thank you very much.”
The winged shadow circled back.

Seven-time Pushcart Prize nominee Russell Rowland writes from New Hampshire’s Lakes Region, where he has judged high-school Poetry Out Loud competitions.  His work appears in Except for Love: New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall (Encircle Publications), and “Covid Spring, Vol. 2” (Hobblebush Books). His latest poetry book, Wooden Nutmegs, is available from Encircle Publications.

Wherewith thou shalt do signs

 
The sage steppe yields up flickering the moment that it ashes
skyward, limbs smelted from a quail house into blinking
infrared, into data; translations of the cindered land spit forth
the zeros and ones for GPS; wardens give their go-
ahead for a scramble to the drop. Best practice
 
digs perimeters protracted from above
in grunt work ‘round the augur’s templum,
neon clad accounted for with every pickaxe
swing. Corralled by amber ganglia,
 
the hills the earth just grid to gash,
grown hotter since the bush burned
holy. There, where speech is sacrilege
 
and air pollutes the lungs, aphasia
one more grace descended
 
tongue to flaming tongue.
 

Tristan Cooley lives in Vermont and works on a fruit tree farm.

A Beggar at Heaven’s Door


I kneel at your gate in the maiden winter,
Near the cherry tree
And the sycamore
The painted fence
And the lantern pole
As they stand in their frozen languor.
I think, stooped on these ragged knees of mine,
What a callous cure is frost!
And her house of numb, numb rest
That never welcomes me.

Last year and the year before
My palms were cupped and dried
But they were contained.
Now they bleed and flail
And stain your entryway.
I watch the blood as it runs,
Four rouge gullies in the gravel.

Last year and the year before
My call to you was unsteady,
But it was civil, it was clear.
Now it is unmoored;
In the rain it cracks and splits
With that mauve sky besieged.

But your gate is yet unopened, 
And thus I kneel
Through all these gelid nights.

Sakina Qazi is from Long Island, NY. She is currently a junior at the University of Miami, where she is Editor of Mangrove Literary Journal.

Our Velocity
At 2.73 Degrees Kelvin

...per che l’ombra sorrise e si ritrasse
Dante, Purgatorio II.83

You cannot see it moving
over the slick-rock face,
or in moonlight hear the way
the tousled cornsilk sighs.  

You cannot feel it lift 
the nape-hairs of your dream
but there it is beside you
always, the slow heat
of living, moving along
at precisely the velocity
of your downwind reach.

Looking backward
from the bleeding edge
of time, we must appear 
to be, relatively speaking,
smack at time’s dead center,
so swiftly swells this
tidal diastole, yet we
can only just approach
that always vanishing place
across a fast-diminishing,
a never-quite-closing,
distance.

At the middle of things,
I imagine a swift house,
a busy airport terminal, 
all motion, all polished granite,
steel and glass, and in its midst 
The Deity Herself perhaps,
a slender girl in a crisp
unwrinkled Burberry jacket
who doesn’t seem 
to recognize you 
as you approach, and when,
arms spread wide,
you offer the customary
embrace, she takes
a startled half-step back.

DB Jonas is an orchardist living in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of northern New Mexico. His work has appeared in Neologism, Consilience Journal, PoeticaMagazine and The Jewish Literary Journal, and is forthcoming in Tar River, Innisfree and The Deronda Review.

Cathedral Cats


I know a cathedral full of cats.
They romp in the choir loft,
piss in the pews, and hiss
ungodly hallelujahs
at the stained-glass saints.
I once saw a lonely puss
warm its arched body
against an altar boy’s ankles.
Startled a tabby in the sacristy,
found another in the confessional.
During mass you might see
a calico creep across the aisle
or curl serenely by 
the Virgin’s plaster majesty.
They’ve even been known 
to fornicate in the nave
and devour mice in the apse
right under the crucifix, 
as Christ watches all
with painted eyes, 
patient witness to our wildness.

Paul Jaskunas is the author of the novel Hidden (The Free Press, 2004), winner of the Friends of American Writers Award, and founding editor of Full Bleed, an annual art journal published by the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he teaches literature and writing. His work has been featured by a variety of publications, including The Cortland Review, Gargoyle, The New York Times, America, and The Museum of Americana.

The Magic Hour
 
The magic hour for photo seekers: late afternoon, as the low sun
presses its slanted light across the ridge, teasing the leaves,
layering rose and red against the hushed fields. My shaggy lawn
gleams velvet and lush in this moment; the elm’s branches
arch like the arms of a dancer, rising on hidden toes, closed eyes
tipped toward the warmth, body slim and muscled. The white iris
blushes and bends. Cool shadows stretch from cedar and oak,
from maple and elder, from ash and torn-open roses.
In the morning, there were lists and problems, plans; now
the magic hour dispels them. My human scraping, tiny
compared to this flood of transformation, this glow, this othering
which rinses even me; which washes even me; which for a long
hour of magic dissolves my shames to gratitude, tender and fragile
as long-legged crickets, leaping in the wide forgiving field.
 

Beth Kanell lives in northeastern Vermont, with a mountain at her back and a river at her feet. She’s a published poet, novelist, historian, and memoirist, and shares her research and writing process at BethKanell.blogspot.com. 

Loosening the Bonds – Unhook the IV Drips and Let Me Be Full as the March Moon


i.
Full moon rose the night I died.
Last full moon of winter.
I rose with the Full Sap Moon 
	to lean down and feel its rising in maples.
I felt earthworms waken as the Worm Moon's beams 
	penetrated their underground sleep.
My friends the Nuns knew me in the Paschal Full Moon
	as I passed by.

ii.
Could such pain have been believed?
Sudden and crippling halt 
	of my labyrinth walk.
My voice doubled inward, and prayer 
	was a mandala
	 	of pleas for relief.

A simple tune-up at the hospital 
	became stronger music. 
Crescendo of pain so gripping, 
my blood pressure
failed. Tethered to fluids that floated me.

Cacophony of voices. So many people. Symphonic dissonance –
	so many trips rolling narrowly, rapidly through
	bright then dim lights clicks whistles and bells and buzzers.

And so the dawn. 
	So the dawn. 

Not to home. Voices whirled  
	Too dangerous. 	Too much travel	 too delicate. 
Too hard to manage. 	Too short a time. 
Too much internal wrapping, 		
		squeezing, 	smothering. 
Too much.

Surfing through words, beloved hand held mine always. 
Hers, single voice 
		of home, of heart.

Yes, time. 	Now, 
	time to unhook. 
Yes, Honey, yes. 
She answers my only question. 
Yes, this is it.




iii.
March is the season I walked woodland ponds at dusk 
	to hear calls of peepers in their puddles of spring rain. 
But this season of Hyla crucifer, my tiny totem, 
	is the end of my earthwalk. 
Finale of the tiny sprites' Magnificat is forest solitude.

iv.
Time is a process of being, of habit. Of making plans.
	And letting go is a process of becoming. 

The afternoon of my passing, the maple grove's tips 
	made a haze of red against the limitless blue.

I brushed my hand on each bowed head, 
	resting lightly on the white – like a cloud.

Catch the moon at Full.

Katherine Leonard grew up in the US and Italy. She lived in Massachusetts at the time of John F Kennedy’s assassination and experienced segregation and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination as a high school student in rural Texas. She has been a chemist, a geologist and an oncology nurse/nurse practitioner.