Amethyst Review

No Ordinary Time

Growing older, I try harder to catch
the grace of each moment, remain in the world
despite the constant flooding of thoughts
that sweep us down their jagged arroyo
toward the end of moments as we know them.

The church distinguishes between the high
holy seasons of the birth and death of Christ
and “ordinary time.” I have struggled
against the dictates of the secular mind
to linger in the forcefield of the divine,

resisted the fall into the profane and
unremarkable, grey hatching by which we
count our cell-wall days. But what if there is
no ordinary time, but only our failure
to awaken to sacred existence?

Then these celebrations are places in
the heart irrespective of calendar
and clock, openings to divine love
which is also our human love. Not
moments of time at all, but states of soul

to which longing restores us whenever
our memory of union breaks the trance
of the habitual. Can it be that,
at any point on those lonely miles we drove,
had we known it, we could have been home?

 

Thomas R. Smith lives in Wisconsin, USA, and have seven published collections so far, and was included in Diamond Cutters, edited by Jay Ramsay and Andrew Harvey. He has also edited several books, most recently Airmail, the correspondence of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer, published in the UK by Bloodaxe. Windy Day at Kabekona: New and Selected Prose Poems was published in 2018. His first prose book, Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival, is forthcoming from Folded Word Press in 2020.

A Sense of a Mirror Ending

When you look at the mirror, there seems
Very little different, between the ancient world described in
The Bible, and the apocalypse
We all feel is coming. A vast stretching
Punishing holy desert, the dream of
A misplaced green space. Coarse flour and water
Acts as our ambrosia, our manna coming in tin cans, and any pilgrim
Could do far worse than to feast on locusts and honey.
Most of us would be very lucky to find any seafood we could stretch,
And dreams seem worth jettisoning for
The simple taste of an apple.

Genealogy becomes fantastic again, a tapestry
Of men who never seem to die, their women sewn on,
As good as nameless, just patches on the quilt. We speak
The names of other nations like incantations.
We spend our lives trying to get there,
But we never see over God’s iron mountain,
We never look into his green hills.

I remember one hot September walking back from a history lecture.
My pink skirt caught in a warm wind, full of city fumes.
But where has that wind been?
I felt the past stretching out in mathematical grandeur behind me,
And the future laying out eternal in front.
Its name was Genghis Khan,
Its name was Mansa Musa,
Its name was Lucy, a skeleton girl,
Its name was my own.

A friend’s mother walked the Camino this spring.
There she met a monk walking barefoot towards the cathedral.
An unbeliever herself, but warmed by the familial rites of the trail, she told him,
Go with grace. He said to her,
None of us do.

 

Stapleton Nash  was born and raised on Vancouver Island, where she grew up swimming, beach-combing, and writing letters to imaginary mermaid friends. Since then, she has lived in Montreal, where she studied literature, and more recently has been teaching English to children just outside of Taipei. She has had poems published in NewMag and The Mark

The Way the Light Falls

As a child in winter, I’d layer on sweaters,
pull socks on my hands and make an igloo –
a snowman for my sentry.
I’d dance with snow drifting from grey skies,
my brothers pelting me with snowballs.
I’d laugh and bombard them back with brilliance.

In spring standing beside hedgerows
spotting yellow-winged brimstone
and tattier-tortoiseshell, I’d be chased
and caught by cowboys, tied to a tree.
While waiting to be rescued
I’d count the fall of a million blossoms.

In summer, lying on bleached sand
I’d watch clouds arrive from over the sea:
white whales, dolphins, turtles – all of
earth’s fauna with light and pureness.
Sometimes my brothers would sneak up
and tip buckets of water over me,
soaked, I’d chase them, dangling live squid.

One autumn, I found a tall ship and oh, those silky
white sails – the billowing and promises
of them. I left my brothers and sailed away.
I might spend days in a crow’s nest
surrounded by winds flapping sails
and albatross up in the blue, gliding on thermals.

On dark nights, in the chill of sea fog,
I steer for diamond dust tumbling
seawards in a halo of moonlight.

 

Lynn Woollacott grew up with six brothers and three sisters – all older. She had many jobs from sewing buttons on cardigans to working as a lab technician in an all-girls school. She gained a BSc (Hons) with the Open University and went on to teach environmental studies at outdoor centres in Norfolk. Still yearning to write she studied creative writing with the University of East Anglia. Lynn has been widely published and won prizes for poetry, and has published two poetry collections with Indigo Dreams Publishing in 2011 and 2014, and her historical novel is available on Amazon. www.lynn.woollacott.co.uk

No Face but My Own
—after Santa Josefina, Peter Hurd

It seemed no accident when the walk
up to the doorway where scientists
had gone before was littered with sticks
assembled into Day of the Dead figures.

This, the entrance to Los Alamos
in 1942 prior to the drive up the hill,
where everyone who worked on the bomb
had to pass through the door.

I bought a charcoal of Santa Josefina
down the street in the superstitious way
you cross yourself long after you’ve attended
any church service. Even the extreme color

of geraniums in the courtyard spooked me
as if magenta, orange and pink could provide
a kind of lightning feared would detonate a test
so bright a girl blind since birth had seen.

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 six nominations for a Pushcart Prize, her poems and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and France. She is the editor and publisher of Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press.

The Day You Kept Me from Harming Myself,
I Embraced You as You Left My Side

—for Tula & Jenn

I remained silent, my movement & stillness familiar,
your voices light over me, laughter leaving me no strength

to end it all.

My heart sparked despite itself,
& your warmth dusted me; you held my eyes

to yourself, cupped my ears
in your hands until I heard God wash

against me, hold me abandoned in floods,
wounds cleaned & smoothed.

How clever we molded together,
reached depths no light touches. You each drew me closer,

hid me within you, not from you: the last look of you filling my eyes
with yours, & I remember the looks,

how it told me you both would never leave.

 

Ariana D. Den Bleyker is a Pittsburgh native currently residing in New York’s Hudson Valley where she is a wife and mother of two. When she’s not writing, she’s spending time with her family and every once in a while sleeps. She is the author of three collections, nineteen chapbooks, three crime novellas, a novelette, and an experimental memoir. She hopes you’ll fall in love with her words.

On the Way to the Basilica of Saint Francis

 

To say they were like pigeons—that little flock

of Asian nuns hurrying down a narrow street

in Assisi—is to say their gray cotton habits

looked layered and pearly in feathered April sunlight.

It is to say also that Francis would have loved them

as he loved the tiny sparrows, the small and certain

industry of their prayers, their unmistakable chirps of joy.

 

Lisa Zimmerman’s poetry has appeared in Florida Review, Poet Lore, Colorado Review, Cave Wall, SWWIM Every Day and other journals. Her first book won the Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award. Among other collections are The Light at the Edge of Everything and The Hours I Keep. She’s a four-time Pushcart nominee.

Gourds

Grace laughs at beauty.
Even the misshapen squash
has its own season.

 

Jen Stewart Fueston lives in Longmont, Colorado. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of journals, most recently Ruminate, Rock & Sling, and The St. Katherine Review. Her poems have twice been finalists for the McCabe poetry prize, and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her first chapbook, “Visitations,” was published in 2015, and her second, “Latch,” will be released in early 2019. She has taught writing at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as well as internationally in Hungary, Turkey, and Lithuania.

Midnight Ministers
“Are not all ministering spirits
sent out to serve…?” -Hebrews 1:14

Just like that—
we imagined later—
the quick flick of blue,
the sly leap of yellow,
the sharp prick of red
revving up into fiercer flames
and escaping from our
chipped brick chimney to our
cold 20’ x 20’ square of space,
rough floorboards where we
—only the night before—
huddled our child bodies
together for warmth while—
inches from our sleep-deprived
but truth-telling eyes—that specter,
muscled guardian of light—spread
like a shield his shimmering wings
before the dilapidated fireplace.

The next night of long-remembered,
only ash-left destruction,
after heat flung itself from floor
to curtains to outer door,
and the entire structure of our home
crumbled, we knew—though away
and unaware at that moment
of the blistering dangers of the hour—
yes, we knew as children know, the wide,
protective arms of angels, the blazing
gratitude of the saved.

 

 

Winner of America Magazine’s 2019 Foley Poetry Prize, Lock Haven University English Professor Marjorie Maddox has published 11 collections of poetry—including Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation and True, False, None of the Above—What She Was Saying(prose); children’s books; Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (co-editor); Presence (assistant editor). See www.marjoriemaddox.com

Russian Sage (Pervaskia)

I have to get close
to breathe in with my eyes
the astonished quiet brightness
of the lavender flowers
that have come to stay with me.
I watch how they endure
the worst of storms
lashed about and bent
by whipping winds
and slashing rains
only to stand upright
the next day
on their feather shaped
leafy stems, tall in strength.
They teach me how to cope
and how to enjoy the sun.

 

Janet Krauss, who has two books of poetry published, Borrowed Scenery, Yuganta Press, and Through the Trees of Autumn, Spartina Press, has recently retired from teaching English at Fairfield University. Her mission is to help and guide Bridgeport’s  young children through her teaching creative writing, leading book clubs and reading to and engaging a kindergarten class. As a poet, she co-directs the poetry program of the Black Rock Art Guild. In  May, 2018 her poem, “A View from a Window” was published in Amethyst Review.

Acrostic for Therese of Lisieux

Doctor of the Church
1873-1897

Trust in Jesus. Give
Him your heart. This simple truth I struggled to
Express. The “little way” I called it. From the inner
Recesses of my soul, I prayed my earthly
Exile would be brief (God’s will), begged for
Strength to bear peacefully and joyfully
Every suffering, desiring not my own consolation, but the

Opportunity to give pleasure to Jesus, to keep the
Flame of love burning. I abandoned myself to

Love, even when I felt nothing, abysmal
Indifference, so dense it threatened to
Suffocate my very being. Your yoke
Is sweet, Your burden light, I prayed, trusted that
Entering heaven, I’d be granted my fervent wish to be
Used for good on earth. Only one surprise: such
Xstasy, as is His, now is also mine.

Note: A Carmelite nun, Therese of Lisieux’ memoir, Story of a Soul, is a spiritual classic. She was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1997.

 

Maryanne Hannan has published poetry in Magma, Stand, Oxford Review and elsewhere. Her first book, Rocking Like It’s All Intermezzo: 21st Century Psalm Responsorials, will be published by Wipf and Stock (2019). She lives in upstate New York, USA. Her website is www.mhannan.com.