Amethyst Review

Passover During COVID-19
 
Today the market shelves were bare
though everything we needed was there.
 
Our story — always one of floods 
and plagues and being smote 
 
was told while what I piled at every place
— wine, soup, fish — it was enough. I set an extra cup
 
for the ephemeral ghost who enters
through the open door. 
 
It was my daughter-in-law’s first time
hearing our verses and pent-up longing
 
brushed with song. 
The temporal world greened 
 
as it beckoned 
this strangely lit story
 
to the foot of Sinai,  
with all the souls yet to be.
 

Elisabeth Weiss teaches writing at Salem State University, in Salem, Massachusetts. She’s published poems in London’s Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, the Birmingham Poetry Review, the Paterson Literary Review and many other journals. Lis won the Talking Writing Hybrid Poetry Prize for 2016. Her chapbook, The Caretaker’s Lament, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016. 

Crazy
 
“First, let’s define our terms,” the facilitator says but 
ignoring first principles, the woman again 
at Grief Group says 
“I hear 
his voice,” 
clutches crumpled, moist tissue, 
slouches in a chair to be stacked 
after the meeting for tomorrow’s boy
or girl scouts
or the senior craft session—
I’ve never learned which. 
It’s the light of community center
 
And I think, Are you crazy? 
I wish I 
could hear his voice. 
Even a dream 
would probably suffice. 
We no long hear saints, hear God, hear 
the Spirit, only our dreams of madness 
voiced over by therapist mumbles as from 
an adjoining room or access.
I want to be you in these quests
the five of us now norm in this 
life after, come 
without reason, cause, or rhyme 
packing toxins of hindsight to spill over lines 
at job, school, or parking lot spaces 
after finding him at the end 
of a rope he learned to coil
on the Internet. 
 
Are we crazy? 
I will tell I have need 
to know that heaven swoops at earth 
occasionally, and 
time machines are open to
this wind of the abys of 
our stories and the leaves we see 
scattering and want to hear
and not stare another day
at a table set with flowers 
again.

Thomas Allbaugh‘s poems and stories have appeared in Relief, Mars Hill Review, Broken Sky, and other publications. His novel, Apocalypse TV, appeared in 2017. He has also published a chapbook, The View from January (January 2020) and a collection of short stories, Subtle Man Loses His Day Job and Other Stories (September 2020). He is professor of English at Azusa Pacific University, where he teaches composition and creative writing. 

Annunciate
 
She’s been called
to the door. Inspiration
awaits in the garden—a winged
lover, back-lit and eager. A boy,
really, with angelic hands. It sometimes
goes like that. But often it is                               
agony—months of waiting
and then suddenly he shows. 
She turns the corner and gasps: petals 
scattered on the street, the catalpa 
after days of rain. She drops her attention 
deep and interior, her gaze focusing 
down and to the left to search for a thread, 
scavenge for a phrase, a rhythm 
to begin to build a vision upon: white flowers
on the road. She promises
to remember it for later, how 
his fingers traced her jawbone
and begged her to speak.

Melanie Figg is the author of the award-winning poetry collection, Trace. She is a recent NEA Fellowship winner and her poems and essays are published widely. As a certified professional coach, she offers workshops and writing retreats and works remotely with writers on their work and their creative process. www.melaniefigg.net

from the shell of things
 
*
 
Unlike Hansel and Gretel or Shadrach
and friends, he willingly crawls 
into the furnace, the black-boxed
 
tunnel that leads into a large stone
cylinder kiln, not sure if he is preparing
himself for sacrifice or initiation
 
or both at 176 dry degrees.  He sits
in sweat on hemp mats surrounded
by ajummas and ajossis, the aunties 
 
and uncles frozen in prayer, maybe,
or in memory, keeping the heat
from finding new places on the body
 
to rest, breathing calmly but intentionally,
breathing the heat, breathing the darkness,
breathing shared air still enough to see
 
the common particles of human
debris, breathing in each other.
He has his face stuffed inside his shirt
 
breathing in the remaining air he brought
with him, most of him still outside, still
wondering, still unsure if it’s good 
 
to crawl into an oven—if it’s good
to follow the others inside a place
where most of you is left behind.
 

Jacob Stratman’s first book of poems, What I Have I Offer With Two Hands, is a part of the Poiema Poetry Series (Cascade, 2019). His most recent poems are forthcoming in The Christian Century, Spoon River Poetry Review, Salt Hill, Bearings Online, and Ekstasis.  He lives and teaches in Siloam Springs, AR.

Miserere mei, Deus
 
            Make me hear of joy and gladness,
                                    that the body you have broken may rejoice.
                                                                                          —Psalm 51:8
 
 
Abandonment in other days has meant
new stone from old walls—spolia, the gift
of ruins. Centuries are made of those
that came before, composite monuments
to starting over. At St. Andrews, one
cathedral made a town, grey cottages
all framing bright blue, bright green doors, and breaks
to keep the dooryard gardens from the brash
all-withering sea. Red gambrel at road’s end,
now broken every way but burnt, you are
not one of these—no sturdy history
to plunder or preserve. Your cinderblock
twin chimney towers topple unobserved.
Let me remake your boards, your beams a new
embracing body with a right spirit.

Libby Maxey is a senior editor at Literary Mama. Her poems have appeared in Emrys, Crannóg, Stoneboat and elsewhere, and her first poetry collection, Kairos, won Finishing Line Press’s 2018 New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition. Her nonliterary activities include singing classical repertoire, mothering two sons, and administering the Department of Classics at Amherst College.

Chasing Epiphanies

I followed the Bethlehem star into 2020’s longest night—
(Or was it the Bethlehem planetary alignment?)

Chasing epiphanies? Not so easy 
in a Fiat 500 on I-40 in midwinter darkness—

I stopped on an overpass, but Saturn and Jupiter 
were not star-crossed. Not yet. 

They kept their distance on the cosmic dance floor,
not ready to light up the universe with solstice salsa swings.

They’ve waited many moons to tango again.
“Span the distance,” I whispered. 

Then I drove home, glad tomorrow’s midnight morning 
mist will weep in the treetops sooner than it did the day before.

Jill Crainshaw is a professor at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, NC. Her poems have been published by Amethyst Review, The New Verse News, Panoply, Poets Reading the News, and Writing in a Woman’s Voice.

Bookkeeping
 
 
From the Greek plain of Thessaly
Meteora rise up over the town below.
Like stretched-out cotton, white clouds
recline in the curves of towering monoliths
smoothed by weather and work,
as if to gather them for heavenly purpose.
 
Monks carried bricks up the mountains
one by one, gradually building monasteries
that became the apex of their lives.
They sought a hermit’s solitude--praying,
studying, living a life solely dedicated to God.
Inside, icons emerged from walls, 
frescoes of saints ringed the rooms
as candles burned from ceiling-hung sconces.
 
I peer into a glass case of hand-written Bibles
from the 13th century, where Greek words fill 
each page, punctuated by intricate illuminations.
I imagine hooded monks bent over texts
transcribing, then foretelling the names of all
who will be saved, long after their monastic lives.
As I leave the mountain-top sanctuary
I light a candle and sign the guest book,
hoping it’s the second time my name
appears within these walls.

Alan Perry authored Clerk of the Dead, published by Main Street Rag Publishing in 2020. His poems have appeared in Tahoma Literary Review, Heron Tree, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, and elsewhere. A Best of the Net nominee, he is a Senior Poetry Editor for Typehouse Literary Magazine.

Burnt Offerings

Smooth
shining silver domes
cresting yellow winds
stained like men’s teeth
Round mirrored ones
blest by Soviet nuns
whistling with them
A psalm maskil fancies
yellows like refiners’ fire
Lay on fullers’ soap
Noetic recitations
 
Celibate chants
Full of sap
Strong as wild oxen
 
Repetitions and soundings
Sanctifications: roundings
The music of the spheres
by domes upon a sphere
Carved-in and rooted
Solemn there; stay
No adversary shouts their names
The gale screams at someone else
 
Soft agents of tarnished
silver much vouchsafed
A people without power who
made their home in the rocks
 
Sternums like flint
flocks racing
Raisin-curtseys
grasp prayer
Palms waving
raising
Rest, encrusted,
undefiled there

Thomas Simmons is a professor at the University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law and a lifelong South Dakotan. His scholarship focuses on trusts and estates. He teaches courses in estate planning, professional ethics, and the Holocaust. His Tod Browning Loose-Leaf Encyclopedia collection of poems was published by Cyberwit in 2020.

WAS MY MOTHER THE OCEAN OR A RAINSTORM?
 
I wanted the ocean to be my mother, 
shaking seaweed from her hair, 
 
her skirt a bolt of bright blue fabric
drifting towards me as more than an idea.
 
I heard fables retold on makeshift rafts,
rocking to and fro as I ambled 
 
among rocks, 
beheld the crest of a wave.
 
I hoped for a moonlit channel to traverse,
to see my face 
 
reflected back. But my mother, the rainstorm, 
shook berries from the tree, 
 
lashed my ankles with pebbles. 
Unwanted roots emerged 
 
from underneath.
I take the harbor ferry 
 
to leave my roots behind
and lift me out of the dark, 
 
extend my eyes 
to where sails slide into sun. 
 
I mine the stars for milk, 
place my finger on my navel 
 
and a seagull emerges, a clock in its beak. 
Time is a procession. I am hunted 
 
by evening clouds, and I lose connection to my mother 
like a whistle fading in fog. 
 
Pain nourishes me because it contains 
seeds of goodness. I put on a blindfold
 
and keep still. Now I don’t need 
to choose. I am not afraid. 
 
Ocean and rain, teach my heart to sing 
like the clear water that flows night and day.
 
Who is that still voice in the water? 

Susan Michele Coronel is a NYC-based poet and educator. She has a B.A. in English from Indiana University-Bloomington and an M.S. Ed. in Applied Linguistics from the City University of New York. Her poems have appeared in publications including Prometheus Dreaming, Hoxie Gorge Review, Ekphrastic Review, Passengers Journal, Street Cake, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Newtown Literary, and HerWords.

After Advent
 
It’s as if the world has gradually 
Succumbed and fallen asleep, 
Comforted by the still-tongued 
Psalms of falling snow. Each flake 
Ushered in perfect pitch in dusk-soft 
Diminuendo and settling upon the 
Garden bench like a corporal cloth. 
Lean cypresses, adorned in chasubles 
Of crusted ice, stand in cold comportment, 
Dispersing soot-white mists between 
Their overlapping boughs like incense
While we wait for antiphonal winds to 
Raise, in easeful bearing, our poor offertory 
Of moon towards a monochromatic heaven.

A life-long resident of Connecticut, John Muro is a graduate of Trinity College. He has also earned advanced degrees from Wesleyan University and the University of Connecticut. His professional career has been dedicated to environmental stewardship and conservation, and he has held several executive and volunteer positions in those fields. Over the past year, John has had the good fortune to dedicate more time to his life-long passion for poetry. His first volume of poems, In the Lilac Hour, was published by Antrim House in October of 2020 and is available on Amazon. His work has also recently appeared or will soon appear in Amethyst Review, First Literary Review-East, Plum Tree Tavern, Freshwater Clementine Unbound, The Trouvaille Review and elsewhere.