Amethyst Review

Anaphora
 
I do not pray for God to make me well. I pray for Him to make me good.
–St. Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia
 
Pray not for healing and feel no guilt
that you know who your mother and father is,
that you walk on the ground you were born to,
that the rain still comes.
 
Pray not for healing and do not imagine Paradise,
that it may surprise you when it arrives,
how close you would have been to getting it right
had you tried to describe it.
 
Pray not for healing unless of your relationships
then pray as fast as you can.
 
Remember the others and pray not for your healing,
but that you would meet them, in this air or the other’s,
your healing on the brink of their tongues,
your groaning tuned by their bruised or broken ribs.

 

Luke Gilstrap is a writer from Wichita, Kansas, where he lives with his wife, Megan, and his son, Oliver. He received his MFA from Seattle Pacific University and teaches writing at Friends University. A few poems have appeared in River City Poetry and are forthcoming in an anthology published by Darkly Bright Press. 

And what if colour was a body you could split apart?
 
to dream in fields of poppies and amaranths, 
those mountains in miniature, floating soft in songs 
woven fresh and quiet
 
to live inside the contours of memory fed 
on the drops of half-drunk dreams.
So! Now you can see the shapes as echoes.
 
The sky comes streaming down in spools of colour,
and we all have to ask, have to wonder why the symphony’s still blaring, for whom each song 
has been strung for, 
for there is a boy shoveling gallons of paint into the blaze of his eyes, and soon, 
when he speaks, we will not recognise him at all. 
 
He, as the splitting of light. He, as the bursting of brightness. 
What is it to see the inside of colour, torn apart? 
 
And after all, how do we understand what he has become? You rise up to speak to him and when you come back down to share it with the others you find you have no words to speak into existence that which was told. How can you explain something which does not have shape? What string does not break apart when you are lowered back to the heaving earth? 
 
Let it stay divine, let it stay suspended,
exiled in the body of its remembrance.
 
 

Julia Retkova is a King’s College London graduate student with two degrees in Literature and Digital Studies. When not working on an app that connects foreigners with their family overseas, she’s running a small literary journal called Nymphs. She was born in Ukraine, but grew up in the south of Spain. She loves reading books in the sun and writing when everyone’s asleep 🙂

The Way
 
You’d think I was crazy if I told you
I saw God once.
            So I won’t.
 
But I sought Jesus who was the Way
and made me examine what being 
and Way-ing might imply,
 
and Buddha who showed a Way
only to be deified,
 
and Tao, ever the Way.
 
Every night I empty these from my head.
 
As a small child I dreamt a sky-high figure,
soaring black and white, and it rumbled,
                        and I knew.
 
Working in the Holyoke projects
I saw a small girl with carefully braided hair
riding her daddy’s tan shoulders, laughing
                        and I saw.
 
One summer, entering a Quaker silence, 
another room opened in me, more silent, 
and warm, where a light reached down from 
behind and held me like a child in arms of light,
                        and I felt.
 
To say that I saw God once
            is a lie.
 
                        Here
                        in me
            I cannot unsee God
                        or the way
                        of God.

Fred Gerhard’s poems have appeared in The Heavy Feather Review, The Wild Musette Journal, Black Moon Magazine, Entropy Magazine, and other magazines and anthologies. He writes from a small town in rural New England where he lives with his wife and son.

The Frogs  
 
For a moment the frogs 
swim near the surface 
and I’m gazing down at them, 
reaching with my eyes 
and ears and thoughts 
toward their waiting. 
They’re interested, willing 
to give. I listen and want 
to replicate what they offer 
in these sheer seconds. 
To get it right, I must also 
bring to bear the memory 
of dawn gasping 
365 million years ago. 
I’m not yet able to do this, 
but I’m getting closer. 
I’ve begun to sense the bird, 
how there’s only one, 
how it’s tethered 
to this earth. It’s both sides 
of my breath.   

Ryan Scariano is the author of two poetry chapbooks: Smithereens, published by Imperfect Press, and Not Your Happy Dance, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. He lives in La Grande, Oregon and works at Eastern Oregon University. www.ryanscariano.com

Field Workings – Abbotskerswell, Devon

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Found Flowers – Germander Speedwell,  Christow, Devon

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 Found Flowers – Tufted Vetch, Lydcott, Devon

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Julie Sampson’s collections are Tessitura (ShearsmanBooks, 2014) and It Was When It Was When It Was (Dempsey & Windle, 2018 ). Her poems are published in a variety of magazines, including recently in Molly Bloom,  Projectionist’s Playground, Otoliths, Poetry Village and High Window. Her website is Julie Sampson

After the Snowstorm 

The snowman my neighbor built has melted,
the weather tricks me with its sunshine and chill breeze,
two squirrels play outside my window,
they take turns in a dance like chase.
I want to frolic outside in my pajamas,
attend a concert with five hundred guests,
engage political disagreements without violence.
I want to hug my neighbors and my friends.
I call my friend; his mother died from Covid,
his pain is raw, his voice is trembling still.
We chat about movies, books, our losses,
the strength to shine when the world is frozen still. 
And as I wait my turn for the vaccine,
pandemic winter melts into spring. 

Yevgeniya Przhebelskaya has held a variety of paid and volunteer jobs in the education field, including teaching introductory college classes and facilitating poetry workshops. Yevgeniya’s poems have been published in Time of Singing, Page and Spine, First Literary Review-East, Ancient Paths, and other print and online publications, and were nominated for the Pushcart Prize two times. Check out more of her poems at ypoetry.weebly.com 

On the Rue du Bac
 
Begin by the Quay d’Orsay
And entering the quartier
First a broad and straight few blocks 
Then things start to narrow 
Press of the older city
 
Start to bias leftwards
Steady like a scythe blade
You couldn’t see the end of the long
Street’s shaded inverted
Trajectory always hid
 
Its faces your future a few
Minutes ahead askew
Until you sighted a crossing of roads
Ahead and here’s a doorway
You’re behind Le Bon Marché
 
Nuns are streaming in
A sudden phenomenon
And seeming magnetised you join
Their subterranean movement
The shopping day steps on
 
In its interiority
Courtyard and chapel quietly
When seated something is let free
Under the colour of Mary
And Catherine Labouré

Martin Potter (https://martinpotterpoet.home.blog) is a poet and academic, and his poems have appeared in Acumen, The French Literary Review, Eborakon, Scintilla, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Poetry Village, and other journals. His pamphlet In the Particular was published by Eyewear in December, 2017. 

Cleaving Light 
 
sun blinks above a band of dove-grey 
cloud. descending to an early horizon, she turns 
                          her strange manifesting on me. 
 
streams glint through the V of maple boughs; 
leaves flicker at a value approaching zero. 
                          I am in her beam,
 
angled for the downcast eyes 
of Mary, for Bryn Celli Ddu at solstice,
                          for the canyon growing deep 
 
and marked behind me—held 
by what I cannot grasp. frequencies dance my eyes
                          —I am what she makes—real/
 
eluding, the hawk now            drifting.
her tilt to wane skimming my brow, 
                          my muttered stay, as sky fills up with night.

Kathryn Knight Sonntag is the author of the poetry collection The Tree at the Center (BCC Press, 2019). She has recent and forthcoming poems in Psaltery & Lyre, Abstract Magazine, The Curator, and the anthology Blossom as the Cliffrose (Torrey House Press, 2021). She works as a landscape architect in Salt Lake City, Utah. www.kathrynknightsonntag.com

We Measure by the Second-Hand Circling
 
 
tick of breaths in / breaths out 
                            water rising / receding 
 
the way young children 
gather daisies 
to fashion into necklaces, into crowns
 
later pick petals off 
   one by one by one
sing riddles, make up love’s depths predicted
by flower 
stamen, pistil, thin leaves arcing around 
the tender yellow button
praise of tulips, of a lily’s soft unfurling
 
the butterfly/ bee/ hummingbird
 
the nectar 
 
the sweet buzz and hum          a wing / a whir 
 
                       a pearl in a nest of moss 
 
the precarious hope of an egg 
 
*
 
late May / early June 
 
from greening leaves curling open 
moth larvae on the end of thin silk threads 
hung like hair ribbons
filaments shimmering in dusty light 
 
*
 
We want to feel the wondrous 
 
the way water leaves us
evaporates into clouds , into air
 
the way a bird’s small body
curves into feathered flight

Molly Fuller is the author of the full-length collection For Girls Forged by Lightning: Prose & Other Poems (All Nations Press) and two chapbooks Tender the Body (Spare Change Press) and The Neighborhood Psycho Dreams of Love (Cutty Wren Press). Her work has appeared in Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence, New Poetry from the Midwest, 100 Word Story, NANO Fiction, and Bellingham Review.  She is the recipient of a 2020 Artist Residency from both Vermont Studio Center and Wassaic Project. Fuller is the winner of the Gris Gris2020 Summer Poetry Contest. You can find her on Instagram and twitter @mollyfulleryeah.  

Seven of Pentacles
 
“But release me from my bands
with the help of your good hands:
gentle breath of yours my sails
must fill or else my project fails
which was to please.”
 
I take my face in my own hands
and stare right into it: the jawline
sharper, the hairline lower, the forehead
not yet creased by the hard years
from which I’ve only now emerged
and which I did not know I’d
set in motion and say, firmly, 
“A fallow field is not a failure,”
but I do not hear me, poor thing; I
am not in the habit of hearing anything
but the too-long pauses after I say I 
love him before I hear it back. I 
pleased and I pleased and I pleased and I 
still watched the project fail—no, 
fallow—the project fallowed, the field
dry and cracked for the season, but I 
am free of its burden for good. 

Jacob Budenz is a queer writer, multi-disciplinary performer, educator and witch with an MFA from University of New Orleans and a BA from Johns Hopkins University. The author of PASTEL WITCHERIES (Seven Kitchens Press 2018), Budenz has fiction and poetry in Slipstream Press, Wizards in Space, Entropy Magazine, Pussy Magic, and more, as well as anthologies by Mason Jar Press, Lycan Valley Press, and Mad Scientist Journals. You can follow Jake’s work on Instagram (@dreambabyjake), Twitter (@jakebeearts), or the internet beyond (www.jakebeearts.com).