Amethyst Review

QUIS HIC LOCUS, QUAE REGIO, QUAE MUNDI PLAGA?
from ‘Marina’, a poem by T.S. Eliot

There is an infinite aspect of our being which knows more about us than we do. Writers who converse with themselves are lights flickering in liminality. This passage urges them to progress to wholeness and safety in a world which does not proffer absolutes. Many adhere to structures like time and conventional morality. Writers will risk unhinging these to engage in introspection.

The sacred is similar to an orchestral composition whereby the accompaniments align into synchronistic harmony. This dislodges the pervious interior movement of the psyche, or the soul or even God. This can be interpreted to mean the core or true self, which desires us to stretch or fan its natural and relational potential like the splayed branches of a tree.

Writing is a dialog with this Self which challenges the false self or the constructed ego. Wholeness begins to form when contact has been made with the sacred. The ego functions instrumentally rather than as an obstruction and the Self rises like the string or umbilical cord of a kite in the wind.

Writing is a reconciliation of tensions beneath conscious awareness, so thoughts, feelings or ideas which are initially located may assemble very differently by the end of the page. What is written can never be wrong, because what emerges spontaneously from the psyche always tines towards a purposeful direction. What we believe may be an error or a slip will be pregnant with meaning and serves as a providential knot because untwisting it reveals some aspect of our lives we were once unaware of.

Intuitive writers float between conscious and unconscious worlds. They communicate between the two realms and understand there is no fixed or finite reality. Physical reality is only a slither of what is and what our senses limit us to. The sacred world is non-spatiotemporal. It is a layered and webbed sea made of gossamer – very delicate and seemingly ephemeral.

What is under our skin remains whether we distract ourselves from it or not. It may slide under consciousness, but it will never disappear. It can only be resolved, and writing, being a personal, idiosyncratic and patient process, enables us to grasp these spiritual aspects of ourselves.

Therapeutic writing serves to bind our loosened ties to unite our own being which, in turn, can untie generations of complexes. We are not just one being but one part of a natural jigsaw. Every thought or feeling results in particular tendencies which affect others we are most closely related to. These gradually vibrate like waves radiating into the wider world. Writing is a way of catalysing the sacred in preparation for the potential of those after us.

Interacting with the world without introspection results in a dissociation from the sacred. It is like arranging the branches of a tree and realizing too late, that you have no trunk, roots or the ground to grow from.

Annie Blake’s research aims to exfoliate branches of psychoanalysis. She enjoys semiotics and exploring the surreal and phantasmagorical nature of unconscious material. Her work is best understood when interpreting them like dreams. She is a member of the C G Jung Society of Melbourne. You can visit her on annieblakethegatherer.blogspot.com.au and https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100009445206990.

Mothers

I watched a documentary
About wildlife in the savannas
A mother cheetah stared down a snake
….That had just eaten her baby
Until the snake coughed
The tiny carcass back onto the sand
I imagined how it must feel
To be snatched from our life’s mother
How our life’s mother would feel
….Would she bellow
Into the glistening cosmic sphere
A voice where there shouldn’t be
Caustic and shrieking
Starved voids turning
….Their mouths away
Refusing to swallow
Would she summon her plasmas
All scorch and terror within a frame
Of humming celestial ash
To tower over the juncture of here
And not here
Would she intimidate the quivering
….Dimensional curtain
Into regurgitating our bodies
Wet with whatever
Comes after
Smelling of saltwater
….Musk and pennies
Would she use her stardust tongue
To lick the goneness
From our dripping hair
If she could
Or is this all wrong
The curtain….the mother….the assumption
Beyond the snake’s throat
What might spread the fabric
Or welcome us in
Or want us back

Rose Fairfield lives with her family in the Appalachian Mountains where she serves her community as a behavioural health professional. By night she enjoys reading, writing, and spoiling her cat.

The Road Made Visible

You take my hand and fold red ribbons in my hair.

Wisdom leads you through the fog.

Fields part opening to wide forests and a road made visible.

We speak our own language known only to infants, the elderly and the silent.

The ground opens up and we disappear into a land of mystics and saints.

We are driven by unseen elements.

You speak an unspoken tongue.

Taught by beings of the past and souls forgotten.

You communicate with worlds that have fallen.

Worlds with strange names become our allies.

You become our interpreter as we ascend.

At St. Patrick’s Cathedral, My Mother Told Her Truth

My mother would sometimes take me
to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on Saturday afternoons
in the fall, the sky gray and rippled.
We’d sit silently for a few minutes, before rising
to light a candle. She fiddled with the wick
until it stood ready to receive the holy flame,
then placed her hand on top of mine.
Together we’d take a stick and gently draw fire
from another candle and light ours,
amid the whiff of smoke and wax.

I would sometimes ask why we came
to this temple with a man hanging from a cross
when we had an abundance of devas
jostling for devotion in our own home –
Vishnu, Shiva, Lakshmi, Ganesha?
And she would say, The divine is all the same;
Beneath the forms is the One. What Christ and Krishna
pointed to flows like fire through our
pulsing hearts. Eckhart intuited it
and Al-Hallaj died proclaiming it.
It is the oldest of all truths.

She would dab my head with holy water
before we’d walk onto Fifth Avenue, where for years
a wizard of a man drizzled sauerkraut and mustard
on hundreds of hotdogs emerging endlessly
from his cart, which he’d then bundle
in wax paper and serve to his prayerful
customers approaching his cart
under a canted umbrella on the sidewalk.

All the same, my mother would continue to insist
as we walked back to the subway. This is a woman
who saw a man of one religion set a man of another
on fire because he didn’t think it was all the same;
who constantly shrugged off friendly pamphleteers
imploring us to accept the One True Way
so we wouldn’t molder in some made-up hell.
But she glowed with this conviction until the end,
and swore it made her as strong as
the great Atlas heaving up the world
across from the cathedral’s gray spires.

Vikram Masson is a lawyer by training who lives in Richmond, Virginia. His poetry is featured or forthcoming in Amethyst Review, Allegro Poetry Journal, Young Ravens Literary Review, and The American Journal of Poetry.

FROM THE CAIRO GENIZAH

Documents and manuscripts
containing God’s name
couldn’t be destroyed in the usual way.
For a thousand years,
the Egyptian Jews of Fustat
put their old Bibles, prayer books,
and law codes in a hiding place
in Ben Ezra synagogue,
along with shopping lists, business records,
marriage contracts, divorce deeds,
fables and philosophy,
medical books and magical amulets,
and letters by the thousands.

But what was written
did not stay buried.
Eight hundred years later,
in a library in New York,
an old man touched a letter
written by Maimonides,
and he did not court disaster
as superstition predicted
but on the contrary was infused
with so much energy
it buoyed him up
and he practically floated
out the front door
of the library on 122nd Street,
walking as if propelled,
with the gait of a young man,
all the way downtown
to Times Square.

Anne Whitehouse is the author of six poetry collections.  Meteor Shower (2016) is her second collection from Dos Madres Press, following The Refrain in 2012. She is the author of a novel, Fall Love, as well as short stories, essays, features, and reviews. She was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, and lives in New York City. You can listen to her lecture, “Longfellow, Poe, and the Little Longfellow War” here.

Poem of Attachment

A mindful woman
would usher you away
when you step into her thoughts.

But I am a poet
begging your presence
in a poem.

When will I learn?

The ash from a thousand burning forests
will never be reborn
as paper.

Peggy Turnbull studied anthropology in college and has a master’s in library and information science.  She has written all her life, mostly in diaries, but after returning to her birthplace in Wisconsin, she began to write poems.  Read them in Poetry Quarterly, Rat’s Ass Review, and New Verse News or visit https://peggyturnbull.blogspot.com/  .

Egret Trinity

A pale, graceful sculpture,
the elegant bird—its legs angled
like a Bauhaus base—
stands perfectly still
before stepping into the water.
Beneath, the egret’s shadow
forms a curious ink drawing
on the grass, while just beyond,
in the algae-painted pond,
the bird’s reflection—a ghostly
Rorschach—ripples a message
I cannot decipher. Three egrets
stand, recline and float
before me, and I, a witness
to sacred art, am rendered
as still as the water at my feet.

Diane Elayne Dees‘s poetry has been published in many journals and anthologies. Diane, who lives in Covington, Louisiana, also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that delivers news and commentary on women’s professional tennis throughout the world. Diane’s chapbook, I Can’t Recall Exactly When I Died, is forthcoming from Clare Songbirds Publishing House.

Jochebed

It’s not natural
being away from your child
when your child is ill
you’d rather eat your own flesh.

My daughter’s therapist has set
clear goals for her patient:
dig tunnels, keep her mind intact,

stand up to the world.

That’s exactly what I want
for her, for me too.

I tried but I failed
to build a wall around my garden
to build a garden at all,

break open, crack, and then forty days in the desert
but did you know that at the end
you have to make a whole lot of noise to celebrate?

I have never celebrated anything,
been too busy eating my own flesh
been too busy digging tunnels,
worrying at them

(breathing has always been difficult)

but you can hold them in your mind
and they you in theirs.

The law cuts deep. I’ll put my baby
in a basket made of reeds any old time,

but people don’t just disappear
into the ether, into deep voids
that fall away like galaxies.

After the session,
I walk out slowly into the spring night,

(it is now possible to breathe)

carve out a space for the golden calf
in the face of great cruelty.

If they are still there, not fallen,
I’ll learn to blast some trumpets then
I’ll even drink some vino in a cafe window
and praise god, hallelujah
as I sip and slip into dream.

You’ve got to be noisy
the Pharaoh bids us work quietly
so you’ve got to be noisy
(pleasure is your birthright).

What feels intolerable? I ask everybody
who comes to me for advice,
speak up.

I really need to fall off my soapbox
the fight or flight response
is primitive, the therapist informs me.
She’s lost her voice
still she wants me to know
that I should put down my weapons,
that a greater care of me is needed.

But how do you hold someone in mind?

Put down your weapons
lie in the weeds and soak
up the hot Egyptian sun;
some lovely princess
come to take care of them
some lovely soul
come to nurse my darlings.

Vanessa Stein is an actress with extensive experience in the theatre . She currently teaches acting and is working on her first full length play and a collection of poems. Vanessa is based in Cambridge, in the UK.

The Witch’s Hearing

A wasp had flown in earlier
while I’d been busy
getting ready, a creature
easily misunderstood.
I helped it leave my room
.
and asked it, to rid me
of my ills – a heavy task
for such small wings –
or take my plea upwards,
and intercede for me.
.
Outside, the breeze sets
a birch ablaze
with trembling sunlit leaves;
while decollated cherubs
hover over mounted cameras
.
and laminated exit signs:
a stick figure bolts into
an empty square, salvation
indicated by an arrow
pointing down, at court 2.
.
When my secret trial starts
I must not risk contempt
by speaking: the family judge
has alerted everyone about my
poisonous maternal eloquence.
.
I will be a humble appellant and
sit with hands in lap, head down
in a plain shift – surrender to
a higher justice – pray my child
stays with me, protected.

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

Her rapture had ended

One memory still persists; of my
mother looking over me; chock-a-block
with disease and pestilence in her
bones and brain but still interested in
whether I am sleeping; remembering
or even seeing in me there another
daughter; with less growth and
neophyte exuberance.

She was suffering and near her
cancer-blackened end, but in the
middle of that summer night she
thought to look in on me, and, and,
when I asked her if she was ‘Okay
Mum?’ she turned and walked away;
shuffling, as if I had broken some
spell she was under.

Her rapture had ended.

Claire Sexton is a fifty year old librarian living in Berkshire, but originally from Wales. She lived in London for twenty years and is currently detoxing from this experience. She has been published in Ink, Sweat and Tears, Foxglove Journal, Amethyst Review, and Light: a Journal of Photography and Poetry.