Amethyst Review

BOOM

and hope is painted
like a dogwood over a penny farthing
daguerreotyped for so long
like gardens on verandas
with little haggling leaves
or sons rapt with leatherwork
hair caught in their fingers
their foreboding gone for Lent

Dallis grass and moons like Ganymede
worlds made from hot matter, melted and bent
and Man watches from an airy railcar
ever set apart from the symphony

ascend to hallelujah
from sea ice to rice paddies
Taconic Mountains
all rolling and gone
raven on a branch
flicks her braided wings
brushes the horses
that remain unbranded
and in the knapweed
rhymes, Vesuvian
all bold and rabbity
connect us to the symphony

reflect back to us
our panicked need
reflect back to us
our panicked need

C.T. McClintock lives her best life in Brooklyn. She is a Doctoral Fellow at St. John’s University in Queens where she teaches undergraduate writing and works as the Assistant Editor of the St. John’s Humanities Review. Follow her on Instagram (@c.t.mcclintock) for her latest writing.

Cope

To cope: from kolaphos, ‘blow with the fist’
via Latin, Old French to Middle English,
to cope: to meet in battle, come to blows.

To cope: to struggle on fairly even terms,
or with some success; or, to handle;
to withstand; to match oneself against.

To cope: to barter, trade, exchange, from the
now obsolete meaning ‘to traffic’, used
in North Sea Trade, from the Flemish version
of the Germanic source of the English word
for ‘cheap’; to make return for, to requite.

To cope: to cut and form a mitred joint.

To cope: to clip or dull the beak or talons
of a hawk, from the French couper, ‘to cut’.

Cope (noun): the cape-like vestments of a priest;
the sky (Milton’s ‘starry cope of heaven’);
the covering course of a sloping wall;
in foundry, the top of a sand casting mould.

Naomi Marklew lives in Durham in the North of England, where she moved to study poetry in 2007. She writes poems and blogs at poeticpotential.blogspot.com.

In The Midst Of Grace

Peace to the right of me,
compassion to the left of me,
Maundy Thursday everywhere.
I’m here as the designated driver
with a promise to behave. My
daughter, a newly minted Catholic,
has found a safe haven for her soul
which needs tethering in something
besides her self. Mass comes to an end,
answering at least one prayer.
Peace in Christ’s love is pressed
upon us from neighbors we’ve never
met, which is more of a spotlight than
my daughter can bear, so I smile a
few words to divert attention my way.
A vague calm passes over her face;
the spirit talked about so much tonight
escorts us to the door without comment.

On the way home she asks:
“Why didn’t they wash everyone’s feet?”

Carl Mayfield lives and writes in the American Southwest. Recent work can be found in Plum Tree Tavern, Abbey, Skidrow Penthouse.

age of physics

the quantum bits
zap in and out
where? where? where?
my father comes and goes
and comes is it some
other chair in some
other nursing home that
holds the man I knew
when he disappears from
here and reappears is
the food better there?
can he still play cribbage
and laugh and recognize
some alternative son in
that place to which he
flickers right before my
eyes? Is he a wave there
still afroth with possibilities
so different from the particles
of himself that seem to drop
like pieces of personhood dried
and falling like last year’s snow?

.

Wayne-Daniel Berard, PhD, teaches Humanities at Nichols College, Dudley, MA. He publishes broadly in poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. His novella, Everything We Want, was published in 2018 by Bloodstone Press. A poetry collection, The Realm of Blessing, will be published in 2020 by Unsolicited Press.

Rain Morning

needle fine the rain
etches the view:

gingerbread roofs
pebbledash
between
the burdened lilac blooms,

finer still the cast of thought—
catching already
what it doesn’t see—
names, between sight
and sight, itself:
grey suburban
day.

Blue tits sway the leafy spindles
fly on,
blue green leaves in the wind

where in the giant sky
a climbing cloud bank
slides along a silver field
fraying into rain,
fading

there between light and light
we see.

Holy Week

Crosses
Find me
Everywhere
This holy week:
Circles’ scaffolding,
Star’s center,
Right angles,
Four directions’
Perfect symmetry,
Interlocking curves
Nest this sign
On the Celtic medallion
I held between
Thumb and forefinger
On Palm Sunday.
Square’s supporting beams,
The human form
In da Vinci’s drawings;
Red and purple God’s eye
Weaving my son made
In second grade.
I have it leaning
On the kitchen sill.
Line of the eyes
And nose: Configuration
Of his face
And the faces
Of every animal
I have ever loved.
The shape
Of the body
Outstretched,
Heart open
And broken
At its center.

Christine E. Black‘s work has been published in Aura Literary Arts Review, Antietam Review, 13^thMoon, American Journal of Poetry, New Millennium Writings, Nimrod International, Red Rock Review, The Virginia Journal of Education, Friends Journal, The Veteran, Sojourners Magazine, Iris Magazine, English Journal, and other publications. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Pablo Neruda Prize. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with her family.

Far Country

Hualien, Taiwan, Christmas Day 2019

The white sheets alone,
ribbed by azul wainscoting
and concrete walls, bleed
a hint of frost and all of that.

The room’s untimely hue
distorts the ordinary calendar.
It’s not the red or green
of festive Christmas.

The lane’s humidity—
the whole town’s drizzle—
obscures for migrants like myself
a history of ardent snow.

We’re unstable in this place,
and still and still the baby’s born.
His fate—gold, a hard rod
and an ice white horse.

And as in all true winter tales,
rumors of the dragon’s end.

.

Greg Huteson‘s poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from The Christian Century, Saint Katherine Review, The Honest Ulsterman, A New Ulster, Better Than Starbucks, and other journals. For the past twenty years, he’s lived in China and Taiwan, and his writing often reflects these contexts.

Body Language
Reflecting on Painting: The Woman taken in Adultery

Why does he lower face,
join the woman in down-cast eyes,
when the other men point with their
calculating, tricky, digit stares?

They unbent, he questions, bends again.

Why does he lower frame,
join the woman’s down-cast norm,
when the other men stand so firm,
bold, strong, cloaked forms?

Is it to give them time to think,
enable them not to lose face,
enable them to lower theirs,
melt, slide, slink away,
before he, with her, stands again?

They are gone,
but he, straightened, there,
with scribbled, scratched and scrawled sand
about his feet, around the ground.

How interesting that the censor’s pen
excised the story, printer’s trim.

Calculating, tricky, digit stares of
bold, strong, cloaked norms
cannot stand sand scribbling.
Crouching woman, better bowed, cowed –
the body language speaks too loud.

Stephen Kingsnorth (Cambridge M.A., English & Religious Studies), retired to Wales from ministry in the Methodist Church, has had pieces accepted by over a dozen on-line poetry sites, including Amethyst Review; and Gold Dust, The Seventh Quarry, The Dawntreader, Foxtrot Uniform Poetry Magazines & Vita Brevis Anthology. https://poetrykingsnorth.wordpress.com/

Seven months after you paint my bedroom Marquee/Eggshell

the halos we wear are hollowed by heartbreak,
and faith is a relic meant to decorate dresser drawers.

we wear silver linings like jewelry.
keep daylight preserved in glass jars

should we forget what answered prayers taste like.
obedience to God is a weight our love was not

made to bear, so I took up the wreckage
and asked my shadow to follow me—

your poems are pressed beneath
my leather-bound Bible

so I may not mistake them for scripture—
it is hard to mourn the dead

when they insist on living inside of you.

By day, Julia Bonadies is an 8th-grade English teacher at Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts Middle, and by night she is a professional writing tutor at Manchester Community College. Her work most recent work can be found in The Chronicle, Halfway Down the Stairs, and NEATE’s The Leaflet.

Book of Hours Manuscript 186, Walters Art Museum

In a room, specially lit to not fade, lies one page of a manuscript
painted by monks.

I want to know where the rest are. All that’s left is the beauty
of ephemera, like us.

The words are gone, taken from our mouths. Screams at the door
for help

have been melted down as fillings from the mouths of the dead.
How can there be no blood at such a brutal death?

How can it be set in gold? I can believe set in the body of child
consecrated by father.

A crucifixion in which at the last minute the father scoops
up the son and says, This has gone too far.

This is more than I can bear even if he is not my flesh,
but my spirit. No, this is the tale of a woman.

It has pearls, symbol of a purity that cannot be without grit,
the invasion of shell.

Kyle Laws is based out of the Arts Alliance Studios Community in Pueblo, CO where she directs Line/Circle: Women Poets in Performance. Her collections include Ride the Pink Horse (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), Faces of Fishing Creek (Middle Creek Publishing, 2018), This Town: Poems of Correspondence with Jared Smith (Liquid Light Press, 2017), So Bright to Blind (Five Oaks Press, 2015), and Wildwood (Lummox Press, 2014). With eight nominations for a Pushcart Prize, her poems and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Germany. She is the editor and publisher of Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press.