Amethyst Review

Devotion
 
At fourteen, you are hypertensive, 
partially blind in one eye,
and suffer from dementia.
Your feline fur is grey 
like the underside of a salmon fillet,
and your body stretches
like a sling shot,
on my tapestry rug. 
 
I swoop down, burrow my face
in the moist heat of your tummy,
white as the cream from an éclair,
kiss the dusting of moth wings
between your eyes, trace the silver rings
that spiral your lanky tail,
while you expose a cage of tiger teeth 
with a huge nonchalant yawn; 
you are safe.
 
Birth anointed you in anxiety.
When we adopted you,
fear was your perfume.
You still startle, and flee
on white gloved paws,
like a snowshoe hare.
 
Evenings, you are a curl 
waiting on my office chair.
You chide me for the late hour,
and escort me down the hall to bed.
 
There, you stumble about
like a clumsy toddler, mewl 
like a cantankerous drunk, 
climb me like a jungle gym, 
up over my head,
down across my chest,
unceremoniously step 
into my soft abdomen,
and knead my doughy belly.
 
Finally, you settle.
My legs are pinned, 
and all night, we dance
in an intricate choreography
of slides and dips, 
because devotion asks 
how many more nights
until the next life comes
to teach us
what we still haven’t gotten right?
 
Praise for the once abandoned,
who love anyway,
who find gratitude in unremarkable days
and nights shared,
watching leaves fall, 
chasing shadows.
 
We lay in darkness,
etched by a winter moon.
Marbles roll in your throat.
I rub the paper membranes 
of your ear tips, frozen,
like tiny mountain peaks.
I stroke your silky fur, 
feel the bony vertebrae and spikes 
along your slender head and spine;
how frail and delicate we are.

 

Katherine Szpekman’s poetry is forthcoming or has appeared in: Waking up the Earth: Connecticut Poets in a Time of Global Crisis, Aromatica Poetica, Red Eft Review, Sky Island Journal, Chestnut Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Hiram Poetry Review, Rockvale Review, Connecticut Literary Anthology 2020, and others. She lives in Collinsville, Connecticut with her family, both human and furry.  

If you could have been here



we could have sipped elixir of sky 
in several shades of nightfall last evening.  
I won’t say blue or even indigo dye 
for those deep-sea toned waves of cloud
that floated over sun’s low gold.  

We could have been one, without talking, 
and seen the black-furred night sky 
steal in from the east, almost stalking, 
sleek belly flat to the ground, a power cat,
shoulders rippling for the pounce.

We could have seen winter-trees’ tiaras,
their enlaced limbs a black filigree 
delicate as sopranos’ high, high arias,
as ladies’ hands silhouetted, so many
long fingers reaching up, up: through fire.

We could have lifted our arms high 
and stretched our fingers and reached 
past tree-tops, clouds, moon, even sky
until we became all flame.

Johanna Caton, O.S.B., is a Benedictine nun.  She was born in the United States and lived there until adulthood, when her monastic vocation took her to England, where she now resides.  Her poems have appeared in The Christian Century, The Windhover, The Ekphrastic Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, The Catholic Poetry Room, and other venues, both online and print. 

mindfulness clear and radiant

Like a theme park, as a kid
you run around
so much ground to cover
so much air and space
to fly through
and it’s all for you. 
 
Grown-ups usually 
use up land on stuff
that means nothing to you.
And yet they made all this 
for you. The world is rarely
yours, but this is.
 
And you can trust 
that no emptiness
will find you 
all day. 
Not in the sky
or waiting in line.
 
Returns.
Returns.
It keeps coming back to you.
You swallow it, flying,
wide-open-mouth in the air
never full-up,
 
like the magician 
eating his long balloon noodle
in one mouthful. 
You taste it in the cotton candy,
in the screams that fly
to the back of your throat. 
 
And if you ever know
this feeling again
you ought to use it.
Go see the world
in sunrise-hikes 
and wild swimming
 
and long bus rides
because the new worlds
outside the window
will be one large theme park.
The world really is all yours;
the beauty in a blue-painted door
 
the sun setting behind the supermarket
the car parking spaces
with lines painted white
and little flowerbeds 
planted by the side;
it’s perfect, it really is.
 
And it’s yours to move through.
It wasn’t made for you 
or with any reverence 
to the sacredness of humans
but that doesn’t mean it can’t be
the place where you realise 
 
that all things are perfect.
 

Elijah East is a support worker for disabled adults in Leeds. His poetry concerns queer bodies and the queer experience, whilst also contemplating the spiritual. This is his first published poem, though his work can also be found on Instagram @elijahjayx . 

Squall

I walk into a house I do not want.
My friend lives here. Dried flowers, stenciled prayers,
A jar of pasta shells dyed red — I hunt
For any living thing. She comes downstairs.

She wants to make a cup of tea for me
Before we go. She wants to give her house
To me before she dies. She wants to grouse
About death with her friend good naturedly.

I want to spread the butter on the scones.
I want to pour the milk into the tea.
I want to fix the marrow in her bones.
I want to spit in mud and make her see.

At once I’m lost. A wind blows shut the door.
I drop my tea. I weep. We clean the floor.

J-T Kelly is an innkeeper in Indianapolis, Indiana. He lives in a brick house with his wife and five children, his two parents, and a dog.

SMOKESCREEN
 
The way to god is where
everything begins:
 
smoke and perfect fire
a driving force,
 
abandoned for love
as it all ends.
 
   © Rupert M Loydell

Rupert Loydell is a writer, editor and abstract artist. His many books of poetry include Dear Mary (Shearsman, 2017) and The Return of the Man Who Has Everything (Shearsman 2015); and he has edited anthologies such as Yesterday’s Music Today (co-edited with Mike Ferguson, Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2014), and Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh: manifestos and unmanifestos (Salt, 2010)

The Drogue Chute


Slow down, the drogue chute says, Slow down, Slow down,
and then is gone, the big main parachute
in bloom, its shimmering the mission’s crown.
Eclipsed, the drogue chute’s final say is moot.
Unlike a sun or moon, it won’t emerge,
obscured forever by its own success
preparing its successor chute to surge
into that clement shape all watchers bless.
The drogue chute’s idol is the jellyfish,
whose mantle morphs, now drogue, now crown, now drogue
again, one smooth curve of salvific wish,
each phase enjoying equal time in vogue.
It doesn’t matter jellyfishes sting.
The dome and steeple shapes mean everything.

Dan Campion is the author of Peter De Vries and Surrealism and co-editor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song, a third edition of which was issued in 2019. His poetry has appeared in Poetry, Rolling Stone, and many other magazines. A selection of his poems titled The Mirror Test will be published by MadHat Press in February 2022. He lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

Platonic Israel

It was with trepidation that I leapt
across the ocean to the desert sand
for which I had myself not even wept,
since I was foreign to the holy land.

Ancestral shores aren’t real to those who roam
awash in all the nations’ ageless squall;
we’ve lost our memories of hearth and home;
diaspora makes strangers of us all.

But special is the gladness of return
for those who’ve never tasted Zion’s air,
who can distill each joy for which we yearn
into a common dream to carry there.

Meanwhile, our God is blind to place of birth;
the true Jerusalem is not on Earth.

Andrea Kibel is a new poet and 24-year-old graduate student in biology. A child of immigrants from South Africa and Zimbabwe, she grew up in the redwoods of California’s Santa Cruz mountains before studying in Dallas, TX and South Bend, Indiana. Andrea draws on science and nature, strangeness and isolation, and Jewish experience and imagery to create poems ranging from free verse to blank verse and sonnets.

Inversion
 

Brilliant as the day, the harbor could be
A second sky, a cistern of unblemished
Blue, with tides beaten smooth by wind.
Past the deep grass of the inlet, a light-
House in exile, adorned in a pastoral
Frock of arctic white, presides over the
Long altar of tumbled stone while a few
Gulls circle lazily above, like wisps of
Incense rising high into summer air.
Remembering, too, how the sky at dusk
Seemed to take on the look of land –
Say, an orchard just come into bloom –
With stars, palest rose and gold glistening,
Set adrift like tiny blossoms upon the wind.   

John Muro‘s first volume of poems, In the Lilac Hour, was published last fall by Antrim House, and it is available on Amazon. He is a life-long resident of Connecticut, and a graduate of Trinity College, Wesleyan University and the University of Connecticut. John’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous literary journals, including Moria, Euphony, River Heron, Clementine Unbound, Freshwater and the French Literary Review.

Then a man pours outward
            
And may be measured by his glories: 
the sudden stillnesses that solder 
 
blood and spirit and unbroken space
when we know, or think we know, heaven’s
 
secret ripplings from that hill-top 
Transfiguration, where proud men flung 
 
their faces in the dirt. Importance, 
but also hope: the sleepless longing
 
and the quick glory that exceeds us
as in love’s unforeseen opening
 
to our unsolved past, ready to bear
the pain that does not belong to us,
 
ongoing loss reaching out behind 
like a thread. The earth must first receive
 
the plow’s blade: then a man pours outward
bared and blinking, yet not diminished. 

Riley Mulhern is an engineer and a research scientist. He writes poetry because it makes him more alive.

Encounter 

I’m there when the young man  
says there’s nothing to fear.
The point when the day turns and is restored,

when Mary of Magdala reaches towards Christ, 
who drifts between earth and air, 
the nail marks on his feet like flowers.
But even as she clings to this moment of safety,
she hears Do not hold on to me. 

And the feeling of relief  
slipping like prayer beads through my fingers,   
snag on the words that follow — 
We’ll need more tests. 
 	
I leave you in the oncology ward 
to walk into an uncertain afternoon 
that leans towards hope.  

Yvonne Baker has been published widely in magazines. Her work has been included in Second Light, Paper Swans, Emma Press and Poetry Space anthologies.