Amethyst Review

The Color of Orange

When I bend legs I no longer know and clench gloved fingers I no longer recognize despite the clear, disposable vinyl, I feel most myself. Neither disposable not invisible. I spent years reading Sherlock Holmes, tracking horoscopes, and streaming vinyl LPs. Always looking for myself, some mysteries solve themselves. Holding a metal shovel that somehow dignifies the task of collecting others’ trash, I reach for artifacts of lives tossed somewhere between Here and There on the Interstate – 95, 295, sometimes 2 – and I remember. Mornings of butter on warm toast. Evenings of secondhand paperbacks and warm vanilla tea. No. 2 pencils on college ruled paper and black and white crosswords. Ruby, olive, and navy-blue polished nails click laptop keys. Streams of thought turned to strings of words. Waiting. Always, for Him.

When I lower my head and tighten my core, I hear – whispers in puddles of oil and water – Don’t mix with Her, Them, Him – words float in the empty spots between Then and Now. As my eyes lock with my own reflection, I wonder about the concept of Self. Self-determination. Self-efficacy. Self-concept. Who are we? Who am I? Clothed in industrial strength cotton, stripped of zippers, buttons, and adjustable waist straps, I am a body in a basket of neon cloth. I am Strong. I am a Survivor.

Greyhounds, pass. Volvos and Chevy’s, too. Some accelerate, others slow. Small children, noses pressed against side windows, watch. They do as I would and allow their eyes the space to linger. I too have questions. I long for answers, as well. Grab your pencil and your lined paper, kids. I’ve got stories to tell. Tales of multi-purpose Easy Bake Ovens and Cabbage Patch dolls. Raggedy Ann aprons and Fisher Price castles, too. Not all mysteries solve themselves. 

The stories linger with the dust in my mind, but my audience has disappeared. Electric wattage everywhere. Dr. Watson always watching. Everyone on speed. So much to do. I too used to be busy. Waiting. Mostly for Him. Now, visiting day is like most others. Pacman on repeat. Asteroids everywhere. Space Invaders Donkey Kong taunts. I wait. For the sun to rise and the plastic eggs – sunny side up – to be served. Orange circles in orange cups. More plastic. Only nothing is perfect. I lose my focus and think of the orange leather clutch in the hallway closet. Gifted on my last birthday. And odd companion to my ruby lipstick in its silver tube. Alien lips, He’d laugh. I wonder if He hid goods there, too. Now, crimson rays clash with orange peel suits. Letters of thirty-six tangerine point font clash with orange cream borders. 

No matter, I’m used to clashes. Like frying-pan grease. Wars of words, too.

1. Demons, Devils, and/or Dandelions
2. Gnats, Ghouls, and Goldfish
3. Droids, Disco Lights, and/or Date Nights
4. Gooseberry Ice Cream, Game Boards, Gummy Bear.

I push aside _1__ and __2__. 

I make room for __3__ and __4__.

I play games of pinball, chess, and mad libs in my head. Check mates and continue to sweep. Swap nouns with verbs. Aliases, too. Consume gallons of engine fuel, exhaust, and bitter pepper. Pepper spray, too. Toxins, everywhere. Cough and carry-on. As my broom bristles sort through discarded dust and ungloved debris of others’ lives, I sweep the caverns and dark corners of my mind. Inhale the lavender, lilac, and daisies of my dreams. Prehistoric peonies bloom eternal.

Trash, too. I bend and scoop Coca Cola bottles – 5 and 10 cents a pop, Marlboro and Kent cigarette butts, stamped and shredded movie tickets – AMC, Regal, and lipstick stained Starbucks coffee cups. Everything is branded. Me, too. I am a brand of dollar stores, fast-food drive ins, and deep discount mattress stores. Of second-hand video game cartridges, VHS tapes, and metallic blue polish. Of 100 percent cotton T’s, vegetable soup, and create your own adventure stories. Graffiti painted walls, Converse high tops, and Hello Kitty plaid sheets. Of wars lost and words misunderstood. Of unknowing conspiracies and unknown names.

I’m used to clashes. Clocks, too.

No ornaments allowed. No jewelry or memories, either. I mark time by the movement of the sun and sky. Palms up, scorched by orange rays. Palms down, scorched of words. 

I’m frying pan grease. Careful, it’s hot.

When I bend, sweep, scoop, and sniff, I feel simultaneously busy and most at peace. 

Some mysteries solve themselves. 

Jen Schneider is an educator, attorney, and writer. She lives, writes, and works in small spaces throughout Philadelphia. Recent work appears in The Popular Culture Studies Journal, Toho Journal, The New Verse News, Zingara Poetry Review, Streetlight Magazine, Chaleur Magazine, LSE Review of Books, and other literary and scholarly journals. 

Women’s Circle on a Friday Evening


What do you seek? the sage’s eyes are kind, her voice gentle,
allowing me space to revel in the silence. I am tense, unable
to meet her gaze. Clarity, I finally choke, my eyes closing
 
I can feel my heart, long burdened with sorrow, opening 
amid a room of strangers, releasing all that had bound me 
for the past decade marking your departure from this earth
 
Beyond this sanctuary, the sullen rain falls like a mantra.
As if in a dream or perhaps a faded memory, I hear 
the sage’s voice murmur something about eucalyptus trees
 
I sink into a kinder time of soft sunlight, lemony scent
of crescent leaves permeating the air, the familiar grove 
enveloping me in a warm embrace and at the far end  
 
I see you, one eye closed and one eye open — a smile
softening your face, you hover between realms, so aware
of both and yet enveloped in the sweetest slumber
 
See you soon, my smile back is tremulous. I slowly exhale
and linger in the stillness. I know this now: you lived. 
You felt it all and persevered. I will do the same.

Melody Wang currently resides in sunny Southern California with her dear husband. In her free time, she dabbles in piano composition and also enjoys hiking, baking, and playing with her dogs. She can be found on Twitter @MelodyOfMusings.  

Drop In A Waterfall


Who tells me 
a drop in a waterfall
is not enough?
Must I shine like a sun
so my planets 
can orbit around me?
Or be an angel at the top 
of the tree?
What is so wrong about
being part of the flow,
one among many?
My sister brother droplets,
what is the ocean
but all of us finally together?

James Hannon is a psychotherapist in Massachusetts where he accompanies adolescents and adults recovering from disappointments, deceptions, and addictions. His poetry and non-fiction have appeared in journals including Amethyst Review, Blue River, Cold Mountain Review and in Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets.  His collection, The Year I Learned The Backstroke,was published by Aldrich Press.

The Lord said, "Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by." Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.
1 Kings 19:11-12 (NIV) 

Silence Heard on San Bernardino Peak


You will meet winds named the Santa Anas 
on the trail to San Bernardino Peak.

Some say before the Spaniards came 
the Serranos called them Satanas – Devil Winds. 

They gather in the high desert, then vector 
through passes bending limber pines and 

leaving time-hewn boulders polished smooth, 
a path of round-rock moraine strewn 

from San Gorgonio’s crest down 
to the trailhead, witness to power and glory 

riding thunder and lighting, chasing clouds 
back to the coast.

I went there, to the summit, as I was told 
you can hear these winds and rocks speak 

and I made my camp leeward of an outcropping 
then waited and listened, 

hoping for the voice of an archangel, 
maybe Gabriel or Michael or one of the others, 

but no one spoke, only the noise of wind,
but I am used to that, and besides, 

if I were a chosen one, I am not certain 
I could handle it – the weight of it all – 

so I settled in for the night and watched 
first stars appear above the San Andreas, 

a crease that runs through these mountains, 
and I thought about the myth of solid ground 

while the wind grew louder and lights 
from the valley began to flicker like embers. 

I tried not to think about the earth 
swallowing the mountainside, and I slept. 

Sometime during the night the winds, 
by whatever name, calmed and when I woke 

all I heard was a whisper in the pines, 
then silence so utter I was listening 

to my own breath and all thought went the way 
of a star racing across the heavens, falling 

into hushed space.

James Green has published four chapbooks of poetry.  His individual poems have appeared in literary magazines in Ireland, the UK, and the USA.   Formerly a university professor and administrator, he is now retired and resides in Muncie, Indiana. You may contact him through his website at www.jamesgreenpoetry.net

Saint Joseph of Cupertino 
 
One unexplained, 
neither cogent nor lost, 
a breeze wedged out of the glooms. 
Of feather blood, hollow bone, 
beaten brainless by seashore wings 
soaring between light and mist, 
an Easter bell pealing  
a requiem to reason. 
Throughout the day  
he paddles clumsily, 
soon billows like a sail 
without keel or rudder 
to hang onto 
for lack of gravity. 
He has few words for himself. 
He blows smoke rings 
from an insubstantial mind. 
 
Never high enough go 
the unanchored birds or 
night’s orbed highways. 
Rising on currents of sudden feeling,  
he flies  
along widening geodesics 
of beatitude, 
departing for good 
from the confines of himself. 

Stephanie V Sears is a French and American ethnologist (Doctorate EHESS, Paris 1993), free-lance journalist, essayist and poet whose poetry recently appeared in The Deronda Review, The Comstock Review, The Mystic Blue Review, The Big Windows Review, Indefinite Space, The Plum Tree Tavern, Literary Yard, Clementine Unbound, Anti Heroine Chic, DASH, The Dawn Treader, The Strange Travels of Svinhilde Wilson published by Adelaide Book 2020.

Summer at Poetry Camp of the Lord, with Petroglyphs


	Santa Fe, Summer 2019


The prickly pear must be prepared properly         Opuntia:

genus cactus.       Paddle nostle        thorns & the shape of a hand
we must use to carve our names into the rock,        the words

that form a poem hiding         in the ridge & cleft.
Eat the flesh        both sweet & strange        subtle

on our tongues & charred with the fire of inscrutable speech,
which each of us must interpret in a song        or prayer.

Magic, the way the wine loosens us to say
what we say in the shack        the black night,

how our mouths pause,       inhabit
the delicate cat-tail       the pine needles simmering
to a fragrant tea       & the unexpected meat 

found on a trail. It’s hard to imagine all the animals
& plants we might eat.        Bodies breaking for us.

In the dark we proclaim each death until the sun
comes slowly behind the mountain in the morning,

illuminating each face as if it were our own.
 

Marci Rae Johnson works for Legible.com and as a freelance editor. Her poems appear in Image, The Christian Century, Relief, The Other Journal, Main Street Rag, Rhino, Quiddity, The Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Louisville Review, and 32 Poems, among others. Her most recent book was published by Steel Toe Books. 

JENNIFER SPERRY STEINORTH REVIEWS ‘ANIMALS I HAVE KILLED’ by LAUREN K. CARLSON

In her first poetry collection, Animals I Have Killed, Lauren K. Carlson delivers poems that incarnate rare and ordinary alchemies of biology and consciousness.  Through deft deployment of metaphor and syntactic sleight of hand, Animals I Have Killed bears witness to daily transformations of animal into meat, human into animal, and God into word into night.  In Carlson’s hands, rifles become sentences, children become windows, a young woman becomes the unopened mail of her recently departed grandmother.  What’s more, through the keen eye of our poet/witness, each embodiment reveals its tethers to all the others; we are given to see not only the lit stage of the theatre, but the puppeteer overhead, past and future scenes waiting in the wings, our own faces aglow in the darkened house and all the strings.   

Consider Carlson’s startling title, Animals I Have Killed.  Grammatically, the phrase implies the book’s subject is animals, and certainly this is true.  As it happens the poet resides on a family farm replete with goats, chickens, dogs, and numerous wild creatures.  But Carlson’s title is complicated by the startling adjectival declaration “I have killed” which immediately shifts the gravitational power from the “animals” to the “I” that killed them. With these four words, Carlson enacts the violence whereby an animal is extinguished by an “I”, and, in so far as we consider such acts of violence to be the “savage” domain of animals, Carlson concedes to being an animal.  Indeed, the simultaneous transfiguration of animal into weaponized “I” and “I” into an animal at the mercy of another is a recurring motif. 

Take the poem “Migrations” which begins, “of silver air the starlings/ under thunderheads/ tumbling as one/the flock chasing storms”, then startles with “this swoop is not a doom”.  Certainly, the slippery syntax which constructs a parallel between the birds in flight and the storm is a kind of magic.  The phrase “tumbling as one” might refer to the flock of many birds, or the collect of thunderheads, or the flock and the clouds together made one.  Stretched across the page, with ellipses between phrases, the words both semantically and visually represent both birds and clouds, each fragment occupying its own piece of sky. The empty space around the fragments becomes the firmament stitching them together, dissolving distinction between, so that when we arrive at “this swoop is not a doom” we are astonished by the sudden appearance of a threat the speaker claims is absent.  Doom may not be this swoop, but it might be the next. At the close of the poem, the speaker declares “a night with no light” to be  “what else but a room/ a womb/ the newborn once home”.  Suddenly we understand the heightened awe and terror of the speaker beholding the sky when, in addition to the migrations of weather and birds we consider the migration of an infant, of one’s own child, from womb into wide world and from hospital to home.  

In Carlson’s poems metaphor is not simply a mechanical device, but an enactment of spiritual transubstantiation.  We see this in “Mary Teaches Me the Sacrament” which begins:

When I tell					my son
our neighbor					died this morning
he weeps					at eight

his emotions					hovering near the surface

The poem may be read in several ways, both horizontally across the page and vertically down, one column at a time.  This formal play, whereby multiple readings coexist and complicate each other, embodies a metaphysical revelation. Reading across the columns horizontally, we understand the speaker is telling her son that their neighbor has died; the son, eight years old, weeps. The title, with its invocation of Mary and the Christian faith, complicates this reading as we may interpret the word neighbor to be a stand-in for Jesus, and the telling to be that of the Easter story.  If we read each column vertically other meanings emerge.  The second column is particularly resonant:  my son/ died this morning/ at eight.  We may understand the speaker to be Mary the mother of Jesus, recalling her son’s death (at eight A.M). But from the first reading we understand the primary speaker–to whom Mary teaches the sacrament– is also a mother, and as a mother, how can she not empathize with Mary’s loss?  In these first few lines, not only do we witness several transfigurations– the present day mother into Mary, mother of God, the deceased neighbor into Jesus, Jesus into the speaker’s own eight year old son (to name a few), but the choices of interpretation which become the responsibility of the reader, transforms the reader from passive witness to active agent of creation, culpable for the transformations they conceive.   

Indeed, agency and grace walk hand in hand throughout Animals I Have Killed. In the semi-confessional title poem, the poet meditates not only on the particular animals she has killed (do the goats we take to the butcher count?), but the reason and method of death: the rooster  burned alive   for attacking my son.  In these poems the poet reveals the dirt on her hands, washes them in real, coagulating blood.  Such revelations invite readers to consider their own frailty in the wake of all that is beyond our kin alongside our terrifying power in the lives of others.  

The alchemical magic of Animals I Have Killed calls us to our better selves, not only through deft deployment of a poet’s craft, but through a pilgrim’s devotion to the gifts of creation– the starling and the storm, the hunger and the meat. It leaves this reader hopeful, curious and longing for more.   

Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s books include Her Read A Graphic Poem (2021) and A Wake with Nine Shades (2019) from Texas Review Press. A poet, educator, interdisciplinary artist, and licensed builder, her recent work has appeared in Black Warrior, Cincinnati Review, Michigan Quarterly, Missouri Review, Pleiades, Plume, Rhino, TriQuarterly and elsewhere. 

Yom Kippur 5781

 I.
I have cancer.
Daven*  in the infusion room.
Power port accessed. 
Blood tubes filled. 

A soul with a pole: fluids, Benadryl, magnesium, Erbitux.
Lean back, heated recliner, warm blanket.

The holiest day of the year.
Worship on my cell phone. 
Rabbi, Cantor chant into silence.

An aide brings chicken soup.
My fast, forbidden.

Rabbi delivers her sermon.
A spoonful for each reflection. 
A sin reversed like failed intentions. 
Pound the chest. Repent.


 II.
The man in the adjacent cubby, short of breath, keens.
Nurses take his vitals, wash his head with a cold cloth.
His voice cracks with pain, fear. 
Let me go home. A cooing, calm reply, 
You have a fever. 
It may be an infection, it may be the chemo. 
They’ll order tests in the E/R. Get this under control.

EMT’s summoned. 
I imagine––one nurse massages his shoulders,
another holds his hand, a third readies his bags.
The crash cart rolls by, parked out of his view.
EMT’s arrive. A gurney with its own pole.


 III.
The Yizkor* service. 
Tears,
 the tom-tom for the liturgy, 
absent from Temple.

I cannot offer tissues, 
jealous,
eyes dry,
scared of what could make me cry.


*  Daven: Chant prayers

* Yizkor: Remembrance (Memorial) Service for the dead

When not writing about rock ’n roll or youthful transgressions, Richard Fox focuses on cancer from the patient’s point of view drawing on hope, humor, and unforeseen gifts. He is the author of four poetry collections and the winner of the 2017 Frank O’Hara Prize.  – smallpoetatlarge.com

The Hollybrook Harp

Boxed in deep sedimented paint and peat
and time, you are the willowed window
through which we listen darkly.

Phantom strain above intersecting joints
you wire us into the dim reverberations
of sustaining songs and sorrows.

Cassocked in unremarkable layers
black light alone illuminates your depths 
and bares your tattooed shoulder.  

Absence is windowed by your frame.
Still, bog priestess, it is you
that moves the air to music.

Robert Stewart Heaney is a teacher and writer. He is the author of three scholarly books and editor and contributor to numerous collections on religious thought, history, and the intersections of art and transformative action. Originally from Ireland, he holds a D.Phil from the University of Oxford and lives and works in the USA.

Hagiography


Over the course of 2017, 
Mary Margaret Sellers – 
named after both 
her grandmothers (neither 
of whom was a woman of repute) – 
stole: 

a women’s running shoe blue (the left one), 
a pair of elephant salt and pepper shakers, 
the change out of a “Ride This Buckin’ Bronco” 
             machine in front of a 7-11, 
her copy of The End of the Affair back 
             from her younger brother (Jacko), 
thirteen pink lawn flamingos, 
her mother’s Amazon Prime account password, 
a taxi from the elderly woman 
             who was on her way to the bank, 
half a tank of gas (mostly accidently), 
$2.38 in coins out of a fountain, 
             and 
a pair of denim overalls that turned out 
             to have a rip 
             in the rear. 

Mary Margaret confessed 
the stealing (along with quite a few 
other sins) at the Oratory of St. Juniper 
in Mission Park, NC. 

In the confessional, the priest – 
middle-aged, graying, but not yet tired
of offering undue mercy – 
asked Mary Margaret to close her eyes 
and imagine 
Jesus 
sitting in front of her. 

How is he looking at you?
What is in his eyes?

Mary Margaret left haunted 
by what she saw in the light 
of that stained-glassed room. 

Time did not let her thefts go 
unanswered. 
Mary Margaret died 
at the age of 28 
from pancreatic cancer. 

She was buried in the graveyard 
of the Oratory whose priests often find 
“borrowed” objects atop her gravestone:
a too-small yellow raincoat, 
a weather-beaten copy of Brideshead,
a broken bike lock, 
a chipped diner mug,
the occasional candle from the Oratory’s offertory table. 

St. Mary Margaret’s devotees celebrate 
her feast day 
by leaving loose change 
on the window sills 
of their neighbors. 

Mallory Nygard lives and writes in East Tennessee. Her poetry has appeared in Relief: A Journal of Art and Faith and Ever Eden Literary Journal. Her poem ‘Song of Sarajevo’ was named Best in Show at the 2021 Rehumanize International Create | Encounter. Her first collection of poetry, Pelican, was released in 2021.