Amethyst Review

confession found in a Motherhouse

for Jeanine Hathaway

Are there prayers enough to cushion this quid pro quo religion
I propagate, grace enough within a thousand Hail Marys, once
I’ve seen behind the curtain, read beyond my vows to open cells
and sentences aligned in tightly kerned prose, passed down
world without end? Am I clothed in more than pleated boundaries—
this habit of black and white contentment, where all substitutes
for sex are self-indulgent— where strangers are made intimate
by the memories they engender? Can I remain faithful in a role
I haven’t felt in years: the good wife embracing a sacrament
of silence when I prefer rage to sadness, flight to lying down?
How am I to grow in love for the invisible finger stuck in my pie,
holy intrusions said to be for my own good? But divine retribution
seldom comes in predictable forms, and I have pride enough
to assume humility in all the appropriate ways. Melancholia
strengthens the heart like an antiphon forgotten
the more its response is sung. Perhaps this is the hymn required
in a strange land. in Nomine Patris, Filii, et Spiritus Sancti

~ MEH

 

MEH is Matthew E. Henry, a Pushcart nominated poet with works appearing or forthcoming in various publications including Amethyst Review, The Anglican Theological Review, The Other Journal, Poetry East, Relief Journal, Rock and Sling, Spiritus, andThe Windhover. MEH is an educator who received his MFA from Seattle Pacific University, yet continued to spend money he didn’t have pursuing a MA in theology and a PhD in education.

 

Behold a Pale Horse

By day, the sun will go black,
trapped by a cold halo –
daylight denied.

At night, a blood moon will heighten
the midnight fights of feral cats.
The Four Horsemen will arrive.

The ground will grumble under their
galloping steeds as tectonic plates
stretch to claim new terrain.

The rifts will split the earth.
The masses will fall to the depths
of a yawning abyss.

A few will flee with nowhere to go.
Soon they will slow and claw the earth
with desperate crawls.

But still the ragged prophet on the corner
will stand steady and hold high his sign:
“Repent! The End is Near!”

 

Cynthia Pitman is a retired English teacher with poetry published in Amethyst Review, Vita Brevis, Ekphrastic Review, Postcard Poems and Prose, Right Hand Pointing, Literary Yard, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Three Line Poetry, Leaves of Ink, Third Wednesday, Scarlet Leaf, Ariel Chart, and Mused. Her poetry book, The White Room, is forthcoming.

Speed of Time and Light

After a light sculpture by Collin Parson

The day after the dog died my friend
from Denmark wrote from dust to dust,
from light to light. These concentric
radiant threads agree—a ladder of light
to earth and back again, the journey
all souls take only to abandon here
on the mirrored lake of forgetfulness.

*

Saint Clare lived 29 years beyond the death
of her beloved mentor Saint Francis
who knew so much about the positive void of God,
who sat content at the banquet of hallowed emptiness.
He taught her prayer travels at the speed of light

so she became a bone-thin candle always burning, even
as she slept, her head on a smooth river stone, even
as she fasted for days on the silence
at the heart of bread rising, on air and sunlight
that filled and filled the holy void inside her.

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.

Red Admirals

She mends her dress in rough stitches
cresting recklessly along the hem,
pulls the long thread out

in a wide sweep, like an archer
with a bow, over the painted eye
on a boat’s prow

as she courses with the stars
or fate, whatever colour
the sail is – psyche’s wings.

If one butterfly can cause
a tidal wave, just by flapping,
imagine a fleet.

Pity a ripple could drown her.

 

Katerina Neocleous is assistant editor of the poetry journal, Obsessed With Pipework. She is widely published in magazines; and has two pamphlets forthcoming in 2019 – one from Maytree Press, and another through Obsessed With Pipework and Flarestack Publishing. She is also a mother and gardener. For more information please visit her at visionsfromhell.wordpress.com

Saint Clare of Assisi: At the Beginning of My New Life

I first saw Francis preaching in San Giorgio.
Most people, even my pious mother,
thought he was mad, perhaps from the hard year
in prison during the war—the stone bed, stale crust of each day—
and the illness that followed. Oh, and all that followed—

He was beautiful when the Gospel tenderly set its talons
upon him. When he spoke I saw tears drop onto his tunic,
small moons of grief and bliss—that he had only this
thin body to offer, this frail and furious life.

But it was a kind of singing, the words of Christ
rising out of his throat, and I felt wings
of a giant bird or angel beat in my breast.
I was so afraid the joy would tear my soul
from my body, I could only beg our Lord
for time to be His servant here first.

I said no to the world that day and yes
to the world inside and yes
to the promised one, beyond.

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.

Prayer

Evening prayer
inhabits the chapel
where I kneel

as wind blows
purple wisteria
outside the heavy
wood door.

God listening perhaps
through top heavy oaks

whose roots
crack sidewalk,
street, water main,

baptizing
the neighborhood,
the ground,
my shoes, my feet.

I plod off
through the night,
the mud,
the darkness.

 

Jonathan K. Rice edited Iodine Poetry Journal for seventeen years. He is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Killing Time (2015), Ukulele and Other Poems (2006) and a chapbook, Shooting Pool with a Cellist (2003), all published by Main Street Rag Publishing. He is also a visual artist. His work has appeared in numerous publications. Jonathan is the recipient of the 2012 Irene Blair Honeycutt Legacy Award for outstanding service in support of local and regional writers, awarded by Central Piedmont Community College. He lives in Charlotte, NC.

Where Daddy Went Thereafter

To find me, stay alert. You can never
know how or when I will appear…

In those long hours chained to a cubicle chair, as you
daydream of home. In the streak of evening sun slanting
the path to the metro, or hiding in the eaves of your roof,
nestled inside the thousand-eyes of a queen wasp. Afraid
to be stung, you do not swat her down. To find me, peer past
the split telephone pole, orange hue warming your window.
See me roving a garden jungle succumbed to time sticking
its meddlesome hand in the soil. Later, seek me in shadow,
the wingspan of a peregrine falcon, revealing an ant army
marching past a wrinkled tangerine. And when my death
day breaks in, a thief, don’t cry. I will be huddled beneath
a cloud of incense vanishing to a heaven you won’t believe.
You will meet me at church, the foot of the altar, genuflecting
to a crucified king. Or standing in the stream of salvation history
rushing to the rocks. Now, I am in the high corner of two pews
pinned back to back, bathed in stained glass color. It is Easter &
a rank of organ pipes blow wide open to receive me – a lily white
asterisk crowning a casket.

 

Sarah Marquez is an MA candidate at Southern New Hampshire University. When I am not writing, I can be found reading, sipping coffee, or tweeting, @Sarahmarissa338.

 

Watching Bubbles with My Russian Blue

I have nothing to do
but lay in my warm bubbly tub,
listening to the Grateful Dead
with a marijuana cigarette
slowly burning
and my Russian Blue purring
in the steamy background.

Some say, a man using Mister Bubbles
at my age
is quite odd
and not very sophisticated,
but for me
it’s the perfect way to let go,

to immerse, to merge
into a tranquil state of Nirvana
watching bubbles with my Russian Blue
as my worrisome thoughts
rise and pop.

Mark Tulin is a former family therapist who lives in Santa Barbara, California.  He has a poetry chapbook, Magical Yogis, published by Prolific Press (2017). He has an upcoming book of short stories entitled, The Asthmatic Kid and Other Stories.  His stories and poetry have appeared in Page and Spine, smokebox, Vita Brevis, Leaves of Ink, The Drabble, among others. His website is Crow On The Wire.

Unto the Plane Trees the Pure Ones Having Descended

tired of blood & vine moods,
having planted trees which
became a protected place,
whose inedible fruits
are a neutrality

cars park under the boughs
as all motion stops but the transiting
of the sap

who or what asks
about transcendence
of the terror-filled stakes?
what if the dust-body needed to go back
to raw pearls & gemstones,
which by then had disappeared
into the ground like leaves?

when the wind dislodged a silent idea
which started walking out from the tool handles
to a place where it could bask
in the indigent moonlight
(where conifers were kindling vulcanism in their needles):
then a carnivore turns into a ruminant,
& an argument loudens
(layered with milk & wool)
in favor of the smoothest board

in the roots of the sky there lived
ones ingrained with something tree-like
growing downwards towards their feet:
what would the towns have to do with
their barely voiceable wooden hosannas,
their visions of forested deserts?

in a secluded spot
repeatedly cleared over generations,
a cross-cut saw is pinched in a fork of the breathing:
but in an attempt at freeing it,
the temperature of the faller’s brow freezes everything
except a memory of a tribe of simians,
their brutalities & mistakes, rainproof
under an endless forest canopy

on one of the trees,
a placard (hanging there
on nails humanizing the bark)
vulgarizes the mass of
its centuries-old Occitanian reverie:
people numb from
the immolation of each of their years
scan newspapers for snippets
of stories foreshadowing their reincarnations,
while historic headlines superpose
on signals to their feet
to stop their search

when she left it was as if to steal
& test fire, to find out
what it couldn’t burn,
trusting not even the veracity
of the sun’s warmth

once, an old carpenter from the village thought
he heard her in a dream speaking of
castles whose stones were alive

 

Dave Shortt  is a longtime writer (from the USA) whose work has appeared over the years in a number of print & electronic literary-type venues, including The Ekphrastic Review.  More of his poems can be found in recent or archived issues of Blaze Vox, Blackbox Manifold, Ygdrasil, Peculiar Mormyrid & the print anthology Emanations: Chorus Pleiades.    Another is scheduled to run later this year in Silver Pinion.

A Pantheist’s Hard Facts

The heart of a stone is not cold
unless the eye of the beholder ices over.
The nearest sun warms the rocks almost to glow.
Snow takes on the shape of a hard surface,
then melts into the liquid light
at the heart of the matter.

Stones are the bones of all worlds.
The smooth ones are eggs
whose secrets must be cracked
by the need to know all,
by the hunger that can never
know enough.

 

Robert S. King edits Good Works Review. His poems appear widely, including Chariton Review, Kenyon Review, Midwest Quarterly, and Southern Poetry Review. He has published eight poetry collections, most recently Diary of the Last Person on Earth (Sybaritic Press 2014) and Developing a Photograph of God (Glass Lyre Press, 2014).