Amethyst Review

Is Nothing Sacred?

There is, in a historical museum in Vancouver
(or was– they let these exhibits roam, nomad-style),
An earthenware bowl that dates,
We know with the help of dying carbon, and specialists
Who have spent the better parts of their primes
Painstakingly taxonomizing the patterning of pottery into epochs,
To something like six thousand years ago.

A friend of mine cried to behold it.
For her, it was more beautiful a relic
Than the bones of some beloved saint. It breathed,
She said, with the livelihoods of persons
We will never know the names of.
Like a baby that died in transit and was cast into the seas,
The skeleton remains are nudged by fish
Who can only guess at its origins.

That night I dreamt that I walked through the doors to the museum,
Entered the hall where the temporary exhibit was housed,
Broke the glass surrounding the bowl
And poured myself some Lucky Charms.
The curators tore at themselves in agony.
I had committed a sin beyond imagining–
An act worse than murder.
Blasphemy against history, an insult to all humanity.
I awoke, however, smiling,
Feeling my dream-self had done something of deep rightness,
Of immense dignity.

Curators might shudder even to consider it,
But the potter, if he could see it, would be satisfied.
After all, who puts their hands to clay, shapes a wide lip,
A deep basin, scratches in a pattern and fires it all, hoping
That it will go on to gather dust and be varnished
By our awed gazes, our respectful hush?
The maker of the bowl did not intend to illustrate a point
About the style of late Mesopotamian crockery.
A bowl does not want to be filled with history.
If the bowl itself could speak, would it not feel vindicated,
To know that it is still full of life,
Still full of meaning,
Still full of breakfast?

 

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.

 

Unknown

Your original wound is not what you think it is.

You’ve been carrying the wrong burden
although you’ve grown fond of what you carry.

What’s tender and aching
is in the nucleus of the universe,
a place stolen and sought out
at the same time.

The schism happened.

No one can say when, only that it did
and somewhere
at the bottom of that fault line
what you lost is healed every moment,
every gap of a second in the negative space
between words and light.

The deepest wound is the one
that was carried for you
on the shoulders of a continuum
from the condensed hydrogen of the Sun
to the soil underneath Jerusalem.

 

 

Cortney Collins is a poet whose work has been published by South Broadway Ghost Society and 24hr Neon Mag. She has poems forthcoming in the Devil’s Party Press anthology, What Sort of F@*#ery is This? She lives on the Eastern Plains of Colorado with her cat, Pablo.

No Thank You Necessary

It was black in my head. Not dark: I know dark from 40 years with it—the shadows at the corners of my eyes, the heaviness that weighs down every movement. No, this was black, as in immobilizing, as in my body on the futon could do nothing but breathe, shallowly.

At least the immobility kept me from the knives in the kitchen. But I still had to make it through. My mind cast about for anything that might feel not black. It settled on I’m alive. I expected no results and certainly no response.

The response came anyway. Alive is good.

Suddenly I had a handhold.

* * *

I take things to extremes. Everything is black or white, all or nothing. No wonder I became a teenage fundamentalist: it was a religion that looked like me.

So did my version of gratitude. Early on, like many children, I was taught to say thank you. To my literal mind, that meant gratitude wasn’t complete till the words thank you were said. After every Christmas I began my thank-you note to my godparents Dear Aunt Doris and Uncle Jack, Thank you very much. The very much had to be in there too or the thanking hadn’t really taken place.

None of this ever told me what thankfulness was. It was a recitation, a tic like the American custom where we go round the Thanksgiving table and mumble what we’re thankful for.

I think I was thankful for alive is good, but I never said the words.

* * *

Every day after meditation, I bow to three images on my wall. One is St. Thérèse, the nun from Normandy. She and I go way back. Her mental health was complicated, like mine. Her life left barely a trace, like mine, or it would have done except she wrote her life story and it became a treasure of Catholic mysticism. It’s not for everyone—the ardency of a young woman wildly in love with Jesus—but her words shimmered in my heart long after I read them.

These words, for example: “Jesus does not require great actions from us, but only surrender and gratitude.”

The first time I read this it stopped me cold. I’ve tried to live by it ever since, at least the surrender part. Surrender I get: God (I think it’s God, but who can tell?) has been nudging me off the conventional track for many years now and I’m like Thérèse, too much in love to resist.

Surrender I get. Gratitude is fuzzier.

* * *

Alive is good didn’t get me off the futon. But it did inch the process along. Something about the source of the words made a difference. The way I saw it—the way I knew it—they were not cognition. They were gift.

I’ve been getting these gifts since my fundamentalist days. The success of my business, which healed the very wounds of childhood that should have torpedoed it. The book about monks, pulled off the library shelf as an afterthought, that introduced me to God afresh.

Or the jewels of wisdom wrapped in the dark—in the decades of depression, the fiddling with pharmaceuticals, the wondering how I could get out of bed on any given day.

* * *

Dark is a lousy wrapper, and I had my chance to throw it away, at a healing service once. I could have asked for prayer to be cured of the dark. I could have walked over to the pastor and let him pray over me.

But I didn’t. I didn’t because I was a writer and the writing was gift—the most precious gift I’d ever received—and just maybe the writing and the mental illness were inseparable. I knew that much, or suspected it at least, and I couldn’t risk it.

I didn’t say thank you then either, not for the writing, not for the dark. I just claimed ownership: quietly picking them up, thinking this is mine, this is blessedly mine, and leaving the building.

* * *

This morning I sat in prayer with no energy, as usual, and energy came to me. A spark of response floated heavenward and that was as close to thank you as I needed to get.

Which makes me wonder about my very first response to alive is good: a tiny release, a small lifting of the blackness, a catch in the breath. I always thought of it as a glimmer of hope. Now I wonder if it was gratitude too.

I bet Thérèse would say so. “For me,” she wrote, “prayer is a movement of the heart; it is a simple glance toward Heaven.” If prayer is just a glance, gratitude could be too. No thank you necessary.

* * *

I know. You have to say thank you or the other person won’t feel thanked. It greases the wheels of friendship, makes everything move in sync. So we do our children a favor by teaching them please and thank you. All of that is true.

But there’s a difference between being true and being the whole truth. Saying thank you is not the sum total of gratitude any more than the real estate contract is the house. We need the words sometimes but they’re a pale imitation of the deepest thing.

My wife taught me this years ago. I’d given her an anniversary gift, knowing it was perfect for her. But she didn’t whoop with joy or smile or even say thank you, and my heart sank. It needn’t have. “When I am really happy,” she murmured, “I get really quiet.”

* * *

Maybe that’s the whole truth of it, or the deepest part anyway. Gratitude reflects the giver and receiver, as intimate as the first touch of foreplay. Maybe with Spirit it’s intimate to the point of wordless because Spirit is often wordless.

Jesus said something about wordless. When you pray or give to charity or fast for religious reasons, don’t make a big deal of it, he said. For heaven’s sake don’t broadcast it. With prayer, go in your room and shut the door and then start. Throughout that whole sermon, Jesus kept using one phrase to describe Spirit: “your Father who sees in secret.”

Secret. Intimate. Wordless. A simple glance toward Heaven. Gratitude goes from something you say to something you exude.

 

# # #
A writer, speaker, and spiritual director, John Backman writes about ancient spirituality and the unexpected ways it can affect postmodern life. This includes a book (Why Can’t We Talk? Christian Wisdom on Dialogue as a Habit of the Heart) and personal essays in such places as Tiferet Journal, Amethyst Review, and Belmont Story Review.

mentoring: the river

as i listen
words like a river flow through us
long and thin like the rio grande
or long and wide like the mississippi
where breath’s secret hides its holy depth—
………………………….unknown and unmeasured . . .

sometimes the water stirs
………………………..lapping its banks with a quiet stutter . . .

………………………………..today    the river shimmers
……………………….with a brief knowing of itself

as i sit with you
i, too, must listen to my own flow, my own stutter
……………………….lapping the banks of my own breath’s secret and holy depth

 

 

Sister Lou Ella Hickman’s poems have appeared in numerous magazines and journals as well as three anthologies. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017.  Her first book of poetry entitled she: robed and wordless was published in 2015. (Press 53)

Mr Cassian’s 54th Dream

The sun is the sum of blackness and glass
when it sets to plough its face through the earth
down beyond the water and towards the core.
The sun is the sum of orange and of red
when it rises up from underground
polished and burnished by the ocean’s hiss.
There is an outer and an inner sun
a sun for countryside and for city,
for the melancholy, bare, and broken
for the growing, the green, the sumptuous.
There is a robin ring around the sun
a strawberry and lily and rose ring
a chrysalis ring, a spiraled shell,
an inkhorn and a black bird, a black bird
with a red spot of the sun on its wing.

 

Tim Miller’s “Mr Cassian” poems are from a collection of poetry and fiction called School of Night. Other pieces from the book have appeared/are forthcoming in Southword, Cutthroat, and Bold+Italic. He is online at wordandsilence.com.

Hearts

My husband has concluded when this life ends, we slide into a sink hole of nothingness and that’s that. A friend who turns 88 this year wants to go to sleep and wake up dead. That view provides more comfort than the Sink Hole Theory of Life after Death, but not enough.

Every day I plead to a distant Being, “God, please exist!”

Brother Dan Cox, a thin, gaunt, stooped man, sank into the thinning carpet of Eastside Church of Christ as he attempted to lead us in singing. We tried to join him as we followed two syllables behind. “Here I labor and toil as I look for a home, just a humble abode among men.” The ancient old people believed they’d die and wind up in the mansion God prepared for them.

I never completely embraced that view, but then again I was scared I’d fall into
hell’s sink hole for drifting from their accepted views. So I went to the front of the church one Sunday and Brother Boyd baptized me in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. When I was immersed, I struggled to breathe and fought against his hands to rise out of the water—ironically not to be bathed in newness of life, but just to be able to breathe air. I pondered if my baptism was real since all of my body did not touch the water and I had struggled against the preacher when he tried to dunk me in the water. All the probing a child who does not know theology and faith might ask.

A Life Incompletely Lived

We called our grandmother Mrs. Joiner. We loved her beyond measure, but she told and retold death stories, which we could recite word by morbid word.

Hortense Patricia Davenport taught special education at Castleberry Elementary with her. Maybe she gave herself perms that resulted in frazzled blue swirls in the middle of her balding blue scalp.

Maybe her stomach became a rotunda and she could not find girdles that did not settle in circles under her waist, and at church she tugged at her undergarment in desperation to control that which could not be controlled.

She and her husband Grady fought to see their granddaughter Patti-Ann after their daughter died suddenly. The abusive ex-husband and his mother would not budge in denying them visitation rights with the little girl, who each day remembered less and less about her mother and grandparents.

Hortense retired, determined to gain access to her only grandchild. Two months later she died of idiopathic heart failure. She had taken her retirement in monthly stipends. After her death, the installments ceased. Grady had nothing to tide him over, and he took a job delivering phone books—not enough for him to continue the lawsuit.

Mrs. Joiner brooded and repeated the story every weekend, thinking she shed one more view to Hortense’s sad saga. There were no new angles to analyze, but Mrs. Joiner insisted she had discovered one.

A life well lived

Grampa Hanson called her Toughy, and she sneaked into the garden today and devoured a fig from the Tree of Life. God might have said, “Do not eat from this tree,” but Toughy devoured the fruit’s pulp and climbed higher than a kite skimming the outer limits of all we know on earth.

I repeat details of the funeral service and say, “At her funeral” until Tim nods, tired of my rambling and repetition.

She died five days before her mother’s birthday. People reproach with hollow words, “She was a smoker, you know”—from high school until the day she took her last pyrrhic breath, hoarse, unable to speak above a faint whisper.

“I don’t want a whole lot of sermon. Keep your talk as short as you can,” she directed the preacher when he came to the house her parents owned and she lived in as she made pencil drawings of the cabin she planned to build on the south side of the family ranch.

We think there should be a certain gravitas when we cross the home base of life—but that is not the truth. At the visitation, her baby sister kept saying, “She’s got boobs.” Something she may have been deprived of in life.

These words see us through, not the preacher’s vague pronouncements about her life well lived or predictions of her new life in heaven: “She’s playing horseshoes with Grampa Hanson” or “I know we’ll meet again and kick up our heels like when she was alive and we took the trip of a lifetime to New York City.”
Words don’t wipe away the tears of her grandson who barely finished the grand entrance of the huge family and who went on the trip. He’d just received an award in school, and now he cried, the way small children do at the loss of a toy, but Toughy will not be present when he escorts another sophomore in the homecoming court or any court.

Still, Toughy enjoyed a life well lived. Grampa Hanson could not purge awkward visions of children with deep black and yellow sunken circles that sprawled into spider webs.

Without words, they uttered low expressions of human misery, “Save us! Please.” When he and his wife Myrtle moved, they turned their home into a sanctuary for children in distress. In 1960 the first group of children came to live in the home they donated to the fledgling Hanson’s Home for Children.

Grampa Hanson first recognized need and took action because someone must do something—and he felt self-appointed to undertake what needed doing. Toughy recognized hearts in need, and assumed roles of mentor and foster mother, saying, “It needed doing, and I did it. There was no other choice.” She had mottos that formed the framework of her life: “Leave it better than you found it” and “I know good hearts when I see ‘em.”

A Life Partially Lived

Jolie never had a good heart.

Her purple Barney the Dinosaur lips caused people to stare momentarily at the creature she feared she transformed into. Then they gazed into her eyes and pretended she looked normal. Her distended abdomen made her appear pregnant, and too many times for comfort, well meaning people asked, “When’s that baby due?”
When she received her bachelor’s degree in journalism, she may have dreamed of working for a national news outlet and like Chris Wallace asking pertinent questions to the President of the United States: why did you confiscate the notes the translator took during your meeting with Putin?

Or perhaps, she dreamed of sitting around a fire place with her husband cradling newborns. She didn’t know how many, but enough to make a house a home. After the birth of each child Mama would stay a few weeks to comfort her during this time of adjustment.

Mama came. She watched Jolie’s lips turn a deeper purple and her stomach more distended with each year, then month, then week, and finally day while they prayed for a match for a liver, kidney, or heart transplant. Ghoulishly, they waited and prayed for someone to die so Jolie could thrive.

Her obituary stated: “Jolie battled health problems her entire life with grace, strength, and courage. She was an example to all of the power of prayer and faith. We rejoice in her renewed body, but miss her presence here dearly.”
Her heart was not good. It never was.

Like Toughy, with grace and grit Jolie understood truths we seldom fathom and beauties we never admit.

 

Donna Walker-Nixon was a full professor at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, where she received the distinction of receiving the Mary Stevens Piper award for excellence in teaching. She currently serves as an adjunct lecturer at Baylor. She lists her five primary professional achievements as 1) founding Windhover: A Journal of Christian Literature in 1997, 2) co-editing the Her Texas series with her friend and mentor James Ward Lee, 3) co-founding The Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas 4) publishing her novel Canaan’s Oothoon, and 5) serving as lead editor Her Texas, which has boosted Donna’s faith that the voices of women writers and artists truly mean something to both men and women.

Leeds-Bradford Airport

(genuine thanks to Rahul Gupta, the proper scop, for teaching me so much about poetry.)

“With its strong underlying fundamentals including freehold ownership with well-invested infrastructure, a diversified airline mix and its catchment area in an economic hub of the North of England, Leeds Bradford Airport is a highly attractive investment and a great fit for AMP Capital’s global infrastructure platform.” – Simon Ellis, AMP Capital, 2017

(According to historian Roy Price, Yeadon – where Leeds-Bradford Airport is based – was used by a nearby Celtic tribe to worship and bury the dead.)

…a bone-white plough. her beak
over rides one “brinded cow” (liveried in white & brown.) she surges,
surges. she mounts the boundary stones, emerging, merging with mist &
ploughs the cotton-mill clouds. the Celts lie deep, sleeping in
Concrete…
..now, her winded-wound crest beams her into the self-same
shroud They gestured to. (you imagine processions of red & white.)
carbonic incense tapers down…

…that deaf-grazing cow, behind
barbed-wire-boundary-stone, has a moment of respite: a
briared river’s flow’s brown & white, in moon-of-evening’s
hushed-up light…

…wild-fowl: they whimper
wearied moon-wet lullabies. their home’s a nearby
Dam quite drowned in the drone of ryanairs bleating across t’ Aire…

…a Tesco bag braves the
cross-wind. it’s abstract now: its plough-songs
of white-of-bone.

 

Sam Hickford is a poet and freelance writer. He has written for The Guardian, Catholic Herald and The Tablet, and his poetry has appeared in Ink, Sweat and Tears.

Illuminating

The den is an inky
bluish black,
murky like
rain has
spilled
fountain jets,
soaking the place
with fluid darkness.

A small yellow bulb
pitches a triangle of
……….daylight
onto an empty
chair
—an open book
overturned—
to keep the reader’s place.

* * *

Kelly-Girl Johnston is an autistic writer, visual artist, nascent coder and educator based in The Bronx, NYC, where she teaches English and Art History at a visual arts-focused high school. Kelly’s work reflects her neurodivergent perception of time, sound, and social interaction, among other things. Forthcoming publications include the Blue Mountain Review. Much of her time is spent meditating, drawing, workshopping at Poets House and staring into space. Kelly speaks, reads, writes and listens in Arabic, Farsi, some Slovak, a bit of Spanish and her native English.

Summer Sunday

On a day like this
When the sun beats down like an accusation
And the heart pants for cooling streams,
Any shade is succour to the soul.

The church beckons
With a sweet, cool dimness,
A not-quite-silence,
And a not-quite-scent.
The comfort of habit
And the distant caress
Of someone I knew once
And might have once loved me.

I know, from bleak experience
How the east wind here has no mercy,
Eroding gravestone lettering
And hasty resolutions.
But on a day like this
Every sense is wallowing in bliss.

 

Edward Alport is a proud Essex Boy and retired teacher. He occupies his time as a gardener and writer for children. He has had poetry published in a variety of webzines and magazines. When he has nothing better to do he posts snarky micropoems on Twitter as @cross_mouse.

Better than We Could Dream to Be–

Listen to the wind singing memory to sleep
its lullaby in the leaves Spring and summer
are coming and so are you rising from the fog
and waiting for me to find you just as I found you
that day we walked to the beach feet combing
the sand and another wind to swirl my hair
your hand in the waves Listen to the gulls
heavy in the sky their calls brief blessings
we walk long as the day stretching before us
light far as the eyes hold and then dissolves
into magic Listen to the magic echo in the water
the air our shapes on cragged rocks
peninsular in the sky the foam lacing
the waves Listen to the tide skirmish
across the water engraving the earth
down upon the sand again we hold ourselves
fast against the coming of time Listen to
hymns whispered in the horizon as it hurls
hurtles across corduroy fields careless as rocks
Listen for the tousle of pebbles the sigh
in sunset the song in clouds as I bury
sinews of my memory in beads chains
I will wear as April peels to May spring
and summer are coming and so are you the deep
breath of spring the only sound I will hear
we are not what we believe we are
we are roots come back as light as breath
as dust and wind longer than it all
prayer in the trees.

 

Sarah A. Etlinger is an English professor who resides in Milwaukee, WI. A Pushcart-nominated poet, she is author of two chapbooks: Never One for Promises (Kelsay Books, 2018) and Little Human Things (Clare Songbirds, forthcoming Fall 2019). You can find her work in places like Neologism Poetry Journal, The Magnolia Review, and Brine.