Amethyst Review

Consumption



I can hear my heartbeat
through my bones.

Not loudly but insistently.
Like rust.

I open my mouth
to scream

but the sound is swallowed
by smoke.

My life is mine to carry
like a suitcase 	or something smaller.

What little volume
it takes to hold us 

razed
by heat and light.

A deck of cards.
An eyeglass case

if we’re lucky. 
No bigger than that.

I surrender myself
to myself.

The way a fallen tree
gives itself over 

to the forest fire.

Art Nahill is an American-born physician and poet who lives in Auckland New Zealand. He has published on both sides of the equator, in magazines such as Poetry, Harvard Review, Rattle, and Poetry NZ among others, as well as three book-length collections.

Same Old Room

There moves a strange aloneness to this place.
The room repeats itself, weaving in time,
the same each day, yet different, sliding by
the same dusty yellow factory curtain.
How can a formal essence beam the words?
Like the room, my brain repeats itself in time,
except when jolts of angst project my mind
beyond the corner mysteries of the space.
One time, when I was tangled in despair,
I found my shuttle digging clues within.
I’ve been looking for that hopeful state again,
the thoughts that once inspired a hopeful mind.
They come to me in moments like this one now,
the warp of each room flush with love somehow.

Tom Bauer always wanted to write poetry. In the late 1980s, he published his own chapbooks, which he sold door-to-door. Currently, he has work forthcoming in Blue Unicorn.

Barren Stones


You found a piece of turquoise, 
when you wandered incessantly 
through the dust, the dust falling, 
the scrub, in New Mexico. On porcelain, 
you found the piece, in a store next to a leafless 
tree, and you held the cold stone. 

It seemed more than a stone, 
engraved with images of deeper turquoise, 
primitive, and yet elegantly leafless, 
plants and grains sprouted incessantly
across its surface, a surface as smooth as porcelain. 
Looking at it, one almost felt one was falling. 

And you sometimes held it, falling, 
deeper and deeper into the stone, 
sitting there in the bathroom’s porcelain, 
alone, looking at your piece of turquoise. 
Always looking, looking incessantly, 
at the shapes, though they were all leafless. 

They were not even trees, being leafless
didn’t matter, but you, you, you were falling 
like it was something you had to do incessantly;
when falling, you were falling into the stone.  
Little by little, parts of you were becoming turquoise. 
After dinner, you would put away the porcelain, 

and then sit there at the table, as still as porcelain, 
you sat for so long the trees became leafless 
outside, and the roads became an icy turquoise; 
no one left their homes for fear of falling. 
But we didn’t worry about you, you were stone. 
How someone can do stillness incessantly,

I don’t know. We talked to you, though, incessantly; 
in the hopes that you’d wake up, we even broke some porcelain. 
You didn’t. Moment by moment, you became stone, 
looking into the design of leafless 
trees, where children climbed without falling,
and smiled at you in bright, beaming turquoise, 

above a stone, a tree that’s leafless 
they climb incessantly, without any porcelain, 
without any falling, climbing into the turquoise with you.  

Christopher M. Edwards is an attorney in Washington State who enjoys doing manual labor when he gets the chance. His poetry has appeared before in online whispers & [Shouts].

Ginkgo


  
We survived Hiroshima 
and the comet.

Our lineage predates the dinosaurs. 
Our growth rings can number in the thousands.  

We meet pollution with dogged resilience
and our seeds & leaves are said to cure all ills.  


	Gravitas.  

	It weights 
	each twig.  


And so we cherish our autumn ritual: 
Lighting our heights in a shine of goldenrod,
and then—

Caprice!—  

in a single day, 
loosing each leaf from its aerie—
a shower of shimmering maize 
circling each tree with a platter of gold.  

Rita Moe’s poetry has appeared in Water~Stone, Poet Lore, Slipstream, and other literary journals.  She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Sins & Disciplines and Findley Place; A Street, a Ballpark, a Neighborhood.  She has two grown sons and lives with her husband in Roseville, Minnesota. 

With a Nod to the Empty Tomb


I will make my bed.
I will seed the earth in perfect 
curves and rows—
fine labyrinth of green.
I will run scales 
as praise, not notes, 
invoke the Triune 
in every chord.
Let me slice onions,
beets, as if kitchen knives 
and cutting boards 
were holy art.
Yes, I will choose words 
like a glazier 
perched in a high nave
carefully placing
each flame-blue shard.

Abigail Carroll is author of Habitation of Wonder and A Gathering of Larks: Letters to Saint Francis from a Modern-Day Pilgrim. Her poems have appeared in Sojourners, Christian Century, the Anglican Theological Review, Crab Orchard Review, and the anthologies How to Love the World and Between Midnight and Dawn: A Literary Guide to Prayer for Lent, Holy Week, and Eastertide. She serves as an arts pastor in Burlington, Vermont, and enjoys playing Celtic harp.

White Noise Days

I’m having a white noise day.
There’s a sound like tinnitus in my ears,
like the distant crackle of a television that has lost its signal,
when the aerial lead has come out of its socket.
An old familiar channel is no longer transmitting.
That’s what it’s like when somebody is not there anymore.
Forget about calling an engineer to fix the problem,
no aerial adjustment or change of set will bring them back to you.
You cannot reconnect with them.
That person is off the air but it’s not the end of them.
They’re just on another frequency and you can’t receive it,
so you will not see or hear them anymore,
at least not until you join them.
You have to sit and listen to the sound of life without them
while they’re up in the airwaves beyond your reach.
In other words, every day is a white noise day.

Susan Wilson lives in East London and began writing poetry following the death of her mother in 2017. Her poems have been published by Lucy Writers, Snakeskin, The Runcible Spoon, Dreich and Areopagus. Prior to the pandemic she was a regular performer at “Spineless Authors”, a local open mic event. Her debut chapbook is ‘I Couldn’t Write to Save Her Life’ (Dreich, 2021).

CRACKED

His sad face was like a bullet to my gut. I said it was over, not because he was a bad boyfriend. I just knew there was no future in it. I felt it in my bones. But bones can lie and so can the mouth. 

I stopped eating. I didn’t go out. I found it hard to work. My friend Lisa thought it was a curse. Or some past life karma thing. She said she knew a guy. He was from South America. A shaman. He could help. I’d just have to bring an egg.

Finding the place wasn’t easy. There weren’t any signs saying CURSES REMOVED HERE or GET SAVED ON SUNSET. Just cross streets in Echo Park and a description: Blue awning. Next to a diner. Glass storefront. People waiting with eggs. Maybe a chicken.

I sat in an open waiting room with a dozen or so people, mostly Hispanic and all quiet. It was a little unsettling. Stoic faces that gave away nothing. 

The man across from me had an open carton of eggs in his oil-stained lap. The woman next to him had a basket full of white and brown eggs that she balanced with one arm, a child in another. I pulled my single pasteurized egg close to my chest, feeling insecure and out of my depth. 

I looked at my number: eighty-three. It was only nine-fifteen in the morning, and there’d already been eighty-two tickets issued. Incredible, I thought. Someone nearby was definitely making a killing on egg sales. 

“NUMBER EIGHTY-THREE,” said a stout woman in a nurse’s uniform. I jumped up. Winner, winner. My heart pumped red fire. I was all in.  

I followed the nurse lady through a string of plastic beads, past storage boxes and shelves full of glass candleholders painted with pictures of saints and the Virgin Mary.

She led me to a dimly lit room with a small altar and a chair and told me to sit. Above me was a large painting of Jesus. He was crowned with thorns that dripped with blood. The frame was decorated with colored lights and a pink rose. I could hear the bustle of the diner next door. It smelled like onions. 

A man walked out of the shadows. He was tall and wore a white robe with a blue vestment like a priest. His green eyes glowed in the darkness. “Welcome,” he said. His brown, leathered skin creased deeper into his already lined face as he smiled. “Did you bring an egg?” 

 “Yes,” I said, humbled and small in my plastic chair. I handed him my ward. 

He placed it on a purple velvet pillow on the altar next to a gold coin, a white bowl, and a glass of water. He looked up to the heavens and said, “Oh, Father, bless this child,” then mumbled words in a mix of languages. I could feel Jesus looking down on me, suspicious. Did he know I was an atheist? Would he call me out? 

The Eggman flicked water onto the altar then cracked the egg into the white bowl. I held my breath and leaned over the bowl. Yellow yolk floated in the bottom. I was confused. It looked like every other cracked egg I’d ever seen. Was this my karma? Was this a curse? Did I buy the wrong egg? 

The Eggman looked at me with his glowing green eyes and said, “What you suffer from is a broken heart.” 

I nodded. Thanked him. Paid ten dollars to the nurse. Walked past number eighty-four with his carton of eggs, past a woman holding a chicken, and out onto Sunset Blvd. 

And then, for the first time in weeks, I cried. 

Laura Morris is an American writer and producer. A traveler by nature, she has spent many a day on foreign soil, tasting new food, stumbling over a mix of languages and appreciating an expanded view of the world. She currently resides in New Jersey with her husband and a piano that’s too big for the living room. Her work has been published in Hobart (forthcoming), Bombaz Press, ONTHEBUS and other anthologies. 

Swept Away

Just a brush of a broom
on the front porch floor,
but I heard sacred psalms — 
the whispers of Angels warning me.
I turned my eyes up
but saw no Holy Host —
nothing sanctifying 
my days, my nights, my life.
I felt the ground beneath my bare feet
rumbling tremors of despair.
I looked down. 
Nothing was there.
But still I feel the earth quiver and quake
as I stand still in place.
I neither ascend nor descend.
Rather, I balance myself in the star-swept air
and pray for Salvation.

Cynthia Pitman has been published in Amethyst Review, Pain and Renewal (Anthology, Vita Brevis), Brought to Sight & Swept Away (Anthology, Vita Brevis ), Ekphrastic Journal, Scarlet Leaf, Third Wednesday (One Sentence Poem Contest finalist), Saw Palm (Pushcart Prize nominee), Adelaide, Right Hand Pointing, Red Fez (Story of the Week), and others. Her book, The White Room, was published in 2020 by Kelsay Books.

Narrow Testament 

for Calum Carmichael 


i
paltering psalters, ill-augered. 
thicker than blood, more viscous 
the stuff of England’s viciousness. 

ii

carry the blood back now, go. 
the shadow’s susseration. 
corpse roads, lyke-ways. 

iii

loquitur signis, signs have 
their speech. you arrange 
the alphabets in prayer. 

iv

dead rivers are wont to sing.
once the letters of your torch lit 
the looming parchment of the sea. 

 

Dylan Willoughby is a permanently disabled LGBTQIA+ poet and composer, born in London, England and currently living in Long Beach, CA. Chester Creek Press has published 3 limited-edition letterpress poetry chapbooks, with illustrations by the hyper-realist painter Anthony Mastromatteo.  His poems have appeared widely in literary magazines including Agenda (UK), Stand (UK), The Interpreter’s House (UK), Shenandoah, Salmagundi, Denver Quarterly, CutBank, Southern Humanities Review, and Green Mountains Review. 

Thérèse and the Friendship Creed

Some of my closest friends are dead. I don’t mean we became friends during their lifetimes. I mean they died before I was born—sometimes centuries before—yet somehow we bonded. One of them’s my BFF.

* * *

Whenever I think of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, warm tones come to mind: yellow tinged with gold, a deep brown—the colors of dandelions and dirt. Perhaps this is no coincidence. I have long loved the Catholic Church from afar, and that affection stems from how earthy it feels, an embrace of everything created, right down to the ordinary bits. 

The first time Thérèse and I met, images of her were plastered all over the cathedral for the centenary of her death. At first I paid only scant attention, devoting myself instead to the statues and candles and the Pietà that kept me on my knees for a good half hour. 

What finally caught my eye was the face in a photo every Thérèse fan knows. It’s a closeup, grainy, black and white, classic 1890s. Her habit covers the head that her voluminous hair once adorned. Though she didn’t yet have the tuberculosis that killed her at twenty-four, I see fatigue creeping into the shadows beneath her eyes. It doesn’t overcome her expression, though: the calm features and behind them something very, very deep. Alluring seems a funny word for a photo of a nun, but she allured me straight into buying her memoir and starting it on the train home. 

* * *

My mother had her own idea of friendship and pursued it with rigorous care. She and her longtime friends would exchange newsy letters on card-store stationery, chat away on the black wall phones in their kitchens, argue over the check at lunch, visit one another’s homes, tolerate one another’s husbands. Reciprocating was law, which led to endless wondering who owed whom a letter or a call or a dinner. 

Privately she would bitch about her friends, but the conflicts weren’t enough to ruin the friendships, not mostly. Constancy was part of her friendship creed: friends stayed friends, friends stayed in touch. Friends were also alive, of course. I was a child, I took everything literally, so without a conscious thought her creed became mine. 

Thérèse and her family wrote letters too—two thick volumes’ worth—but she didn’t require them of anyone. This was good because I hardly wrote any. 

* * *

My ambivalence with Thérèse began within the first few pages of her memoir. She’s nicknamed the Little Flower for good reasons, and one of them is how she expresses herself, which is floral on several levels. “The flower about to tell her story rejoices at having to publish the totally gratuitous gifts of Jesus…. It was He who had her born in a holy soil, impregnated with a virginal perfume.” Oh, brother, part of my brain says even now. It didn’t stop me, though. I paid good money for that book, and I’d be damned if virginal perfume was going to put me off. 

But people don’t leap from introduction through annoyance to friendship on sheer determination alone. Something else draws them through, and it unfolded quietly in Thérèse’s book. The portrait of a family steeped in love, two older sisters who doted on her, a third from whom she was inseparable. The simplest of wisdom strewn here and there. “Our Lord’s love is revealed as perfectly in the most simple soul…as in the most excellent soul,” she wrote. “It is to their hearts that God deigns to lower Himself. These are the wild flowers whose simplicity attracts Him.” 

When I encountered wisdom like this, something quietly encircled my heart and coddled it in place, refusing to let go, like a friend who knows you need a long, long hug. 

* * *

Like many devotees of other faiths, I believed my mother’s creed, recited it from memory, but could not live it. I wrote maybe ten letters in forty-five years. Every incoming call goes to voicemail in my house, to be returned later or, perhaps, not. Alive friends don’t stay friends when treated like this, as the creed says. 

My faithlessness cost me a fiancée once. We’d gotten engaged during spring break of my first year at college. I said something with particular ardor, she took it as a marriage proposal, and words like wait or no or I meant it differently never occurred to me. I don’t remember what absorbed me once I returned to school, but something did, because I went silent for weeks—long enough for her to call me from a pay phone in a panic. When I made the mistake of saying, “Stop bothering me,” she shattered the phone booth with one swift kick.

* * *

Friends have things in common, so it’s said, and the more Thérèse told me about her past, the more it sounded familiar. Even at two she was terrified of offending anyone. Her “scruples”—attacks of conscience that compelled her to confess the slightest fault—reflect my twenties, when I asked people to forgive me for offenses they never knew about and probably weren’t offenses anyway. 

And she melted down as I do, like the time her cousin Marie visited her in the monastery. Thérèse slid open the door to the grille, through which nuns spoke to their visitors, and began by scolding Marie for a minor fault. When Marie called her heartless, Thérèse slammed the door shut. Of course she did, the thought came to mind. She was a teenage girl. Maybe with PMS. I’ve done my share of slamming inanimate objects, so it was natural for us, on some plane, to look each other in the eyes and say, I get you.

* * *

I never mastered the reciprocating thing either, and that cost me as well. 

It was never the right day to invite Alyssa and Mike for dinner. Our children had grown up together: we’d exchanged rides and play dates and talked about work and kids and the challenges that suffused it all. Alyssa possessed the easy grace of picking up the phone and inviting us over spontaneously, the invitation gliding off her tongue as easily as discussing the weather. I wanted to be just like her.

But we keep a messy house, and the effort to clean it—to render it spotless, my OCD insisted—made inviting anyone impossible. I was afraid what they’d think of us, even though I knew what they thought of us, and it involved affection. 

Alyssa and Mike stuck with us maybe ten years, and then it was too much. My wife thinks something else happened: a new friend, a growing apart. I couldn’t see it that way. I had broken the reciprocating law, and this was the punishment. 

* * *

Thérèse and I are not invite-each-other-over pals. Aside from her memoir, we get together irregularly, the way childhood friends don’t see each other for years and then pick up where they left off. 

Another trip to New York, several years later, found me circumambulating St. Patrick’s again. At one point, just to the right of the altar, I turned a corner and there she was, with her own statue this time, in her own nook with candles and a placard with a summary of her life. In an instant I did what I always do when elated: I babbled at her. Details of my life, thoughts about God, how wonderful it was to see her. 

She took it all in, I know she did. Why wouldn’t she? Shortly before her death she pledged to spend her heaven doing good on earth, and that must include listening patiently as I babbled at her, the smile of a friend on her lips. 

* * *

Nothing about Zoom told me it would shatter my mother’s friendship creed like so many dogmas gone rigid. I’d used Zoom for years—so long that, even before COVID, talking squares on a screen had become a default setting. Then the pandemic broke over us, and the law of reciprocation, in particular, got lost in the backwash. 

It was during yet another Zoom meeting that the questions began to arise. When the pandemic’s over, can I live like this? Can the squares on the screen be my friends? If so, who else might qualify? The person I’ve seen once in thirty years but who chats with me on Facebook, can she be my friend? What about people who trade emails with me once, needing my help through a crisis, and then disappear? Or people I have never seen in the flesh but emailed with for half my life? 

And then, over time: Yes, yes, yes. Never mind what Mother thought friendship means. I declare all these people my friends. After all, if my friends can be dead, what can’t they be? 

* * *

You might call our trip to France a pilgrimage if Thérèse were my matron saint. But she’s my BFF instead, so it was more like a visit to an old friend in which she shows me where she grew up.

Lisieux knows how to make the most of its hometown saint. The basilica for Thérèse towers above everything in its part of town: massive outside, seas of blue tile and marble and granite inside, mosaics from her life, her parents’ reliquary, a bone from Thérèse in a glass box (another standard Catholic practice). I only found her in glimpses there, and I think I know why. The basilica is many things, but it is not little, and Thérèse is little, and so am I, the Little part of the Little Flower. 

Which explains why, as soon as we arrived in Lisieux, I hastened to her childhood home: a small square house on a side street, a belvedere atop its roof, hand-lettered sign out front (Les Buissonnets, or little bushes), the backyard covered in gardens, intimate rooms inside. While wandering from room to room I turned a corner and there she was—or her hair was, cascading to waist length in a mounted glass case. I reserve the word luxuriant for the densest, waviest, silkiest hair imaginable. This was luxuriant and then some.

You can know someone forever and still they surprise you, even when they’re dead. Until then, I had thought Thérèse’s hair was dark, like the darkness that enveloped her spirit in her last days. Now I knew better: gold, strands of brown, the earthy color of so many things, like dandelions and dirt but also like leaves at the end of fall, when the tourists have gone and just the fading yellow beeches and copper-colored oaks are left, in all their glorious decaying beauty. Dead has its ways of warming the heart. 

* * *

The giftshop in Les Buissonnets sold me the photo of Thérèse I’d seen in the cathedral. Now, from the wall of our “chapel”—a tiny sitting room we set aside for prayer—she turns that deep tired gaze on me. I know deep, and especially tired, and perhaps that’s another reason we’re friends. 

I have wondered what people would say if I told them about Thérèse and me. Don’t be ridiculous comes to mind. So does you need some real relationships. Or there is no substitute for live, in-the-flesh friends. Or even my aunt’s been dead ten years and I talk to her every day. 

It’s possible that all of these are true, or that none of them are. I wonder if it matters. Perhaps it’s enough that I open her memoir or happen upon her statue and pour out my heart and even hear a response. Perhaps friendship is not what happens between us but what happens within us, each of us transformed because the other is there, wherever there might be. 

A spiritual director, bigender person, and quasi-hermit, John Backman has had personal essays published in Catapult, Amethyst Review, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Tiferet Journal, and Sufi Journal, among other places. For the past two years John has been named a top 10 creative nonfiction finalist in the Wild Atlantic Writing Awards.