Amethyst Review

From: Speech Scroll

(57)
Four o’clock on Sunday
afternoon and the clock’s heart
is still. Thrashers pull scraps
for their nests from the sky, while tunnels
the rats dig
run deep into
the mysterious earth. Time draws
a breath. Trouble’s hold
loosens for a while. There’s a seat
that swings back and forth
between worry
and sunlight. The moment begs
for music from another age,
notes piling slowly
one upon another
until they make a column
rising toward Heaven. Or just
stand there, holding up the sky.

(65)
The light climbs every rung
along a woodpecker’s back
and ignites the red cap
on his head. Tap tap tap
on the side of the house,
he’s making a hole
for evil spirits
to escape. No more waking up
in the night, no more
looking out at the dark
to check for the source
of suffering. There he flies,
bouncing on the air, from Christian
to Buddhist to Jew, one bird
for every deity. He even visits
atheists, and never asks
whose souls are hung to dry
along the washing line.

(74)
Reading an American poet who’s
reading a Chinese poet
who reads only the sky: where
does it end? May as well
go straight to the source,
that vacancy where everything
begins. It’s there tonight,
just visible between
the clouds, the gleam
in a jaguar’s eye
when he feels the moon’s pull
and it draws him along
a trail nobody else knows, to
the heart of night’s mystery. The rest
is balance on the path
from star to star, muscles rolling
underneath the skin and the lip
curling back from the teeth.

David Chorlton was born in Austria, grew up in Manchester, England, and lived in Vienna before moving to Phoenix in 1978. His newest book isReading T. S. Eliot to a Bird, is from Hoot ‘n Waddle, in Phoenix.

The Submerged Life

The dragonfly, unlike us, is a child
through most of life, surviving under water
for years. She learns the lessons of the wild
while molting many times. This process taught her
to recognize the right time to submerge,
the time to lift her head above the surface,
to gather wings and courage, then emerge.
Her time under the rocks is quite a preface
to a grown-up life so brief, it’s here and gone.
She finds a partner and mates him while she flies,
then lays her eggs, and rises with the dawn
on iridescent wings, and soon, she dies.
The dragonfly, unlike us, is aware
that life flies on fast wings, no time to spare.

Ephesus

Bridges bejewelled in graffitied padlocks;
Lover’s lakes and lanes and arches.
There are not many monuments built and left up
To the women who walk alone.

But they live, these women. They possess
An architecture of their own.

No pair of lovers, if it were up to me,
Should be permitted to cross the threshold
Of Mary’s house in Ephesus.
Every kiss seems so trivial now,
Each caress a foolish empty gesture,
Every pound of the heart an insult
To what went on here.

And what did? Nothing much.
A few interviews, perhaps some nights under siege,
But mostly silence.
A woman spending her days in solitary vigil,
Mourning for something lost
That was never really hers.

She turned her wedding bed into a ghost ship
For the promise that someone else would benefit.
Whether you believe she died
touched by no one but god in the desert wind,
Or, after her great feat, suffered to descend
Into ordinary motherhood, remembering the lost days
Of a skin floating free and unencumbered by men’s hands
With pride, with nostalgia, with bitterness–
It is certain that when she died, here in this house,
There was no one to kiss her, caress her,
No reason for her heart to pound.

Stand apart from one another
And try to comprehend that loneliness is,
In itself, a labour of love. Every soul
Is born motherless. You have come to Ephesus
To do nothing but walk through a doorway.
Don’t bring your family with you.
The photographs won’t come out.

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.

An Affirmation of Faith?

The time I rolled my SUV
Forced me to face mortality.
As tires screeched, I lost control;
I barely stopped before a pole
But could have died there instantly.

My thoughts were hard to pigeonhole
And anxious feelings took their toll,
Reliving it inside my head–
How close I came to being dead
With each successive barrel roll.

No broken bones, I barely bled,
But life continued on instead.
The answer to another’s prayer?
A blessing extraordinaire
Affirming faith for times ahead?

Randal A. Burd, Jr. is a married father of two and an educator working on the site of a residential treatment facility for juveniles in rural Missouri.He has a Master’s Degree in English Curriculum & Instruction from the University of Missouri and a self-sabotaging compulsion to write poetry that rhymes. Randal’s poems have recently been featured by Rue Scribe, The Society of Classical Poets, and Verse-Virtual among other publications.

Today is the Day I Will Believe in Something Like Light

Today is the day I attend Mass
and say Amen without a heart.
Your hands move through prayer
like water in summer trees,
sparkling tessellations winking in the sky

the only church I’ve ever been to
is one with broken birds
and souls
with light, blue and calm as day,
lost love at first sight

there is something holy
about a body beyond itself,
a body shorn clean of voice,
of light
as if by a lion’s tongue

You take my picture as I move
into the shadows so you can bury it
with the bones of your memory
the dirt full of holes
to hide all the things we hope
our eyes reveal–

……..(in springtime the first thing I do
……..is scour the ground
……..for crocus fingers climbing sore
……..and weary out of the earth)

You ask me at the cusp of breathing
where will we go

where will we go
when the night hides away
and the light is red as strawberries
in the slice of summer sun
quivering under the knife’s cut:
a final rendering.

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.

Pascha

Those purple shadows over orange dust
That wafts so wistfully over my tired shoes
And wrinkled leaves like newborn babies’ feet.

The chapel’s dark and voices humming low.
The service ended ere I had come in.
The rays of sun too low to shine inside.

I watch the sun go out beyond the hill,
Those purple clouds to peaceful gray subside
And crows in sunset silence sing —

The snow is gone,
The birches’ branches still
And all of us despite it
All still are.

Ariella Katz is a Boston native living in Moscow, Russia. Her writing has appeared in Arion, The Gate, and East from Chicago. She is the co-editor of Does the Sun Have a Light Switch? A Literary Criminal Almanac, an anthology of stories and poetry by formerly incarcerated people in Moscow.

FAN VAULTING

Have we a church here?

Really?

Why does it thrust its stone roots down,
Down through the loam of memories?
Into the bowels of gold and fire then
Leap up into arching branches,
Grey and glistening trumpet notes of stone,
Blaring out to come and wonder,
Wonder how these dancing trees
Were first bound fast in arches

This forest floor is rich in reverence
The dark earth hummed with faith
Long before these trumpet trees took root,
Among the lumbered trunks where
The old faith rotted
And leached into the soil.

Sometimes, almost
Swamped by the rippling stone I see
A beckoning glimmer in a crystal
That is too dark
And altogether like a clenched fist
To sit comfortably under this stone canopy.

Edward Alport is a teacher and occasional writer who occasionally gets published. When he has nothing better to do he posts snarky micropoems on Twitter as @cross_mouse.

Review of The saint of milk and flames: poetry collection by Kate Garrett

78pp,  Rhythm and Bones Lit

Review by Anne Maguire

Reviewing poetry is never easy as it is such a subjective art. What I like (or dislike) changes according to mood and how it sits with what else I’m reading. There is an excellent article in the Spring 2019 Poetry News, from The Poetry Society, about poetry reviewing. Written by Sarala Estruch it says that it is important to deduce what the work is doing – or trying to do. It also suggests the reviewer should have sensitivity, imagination and generosity.

I’m not sure Kate Garrett needs much generosity from me when considering her new collection The Saint of Milk and Flames. Published by Rhythm and Bones Press, the book is beautifully produced and presented. There are several truly memorable poems, some phenomenal lines and as ever some poems I’m not sure I understand. That’s fine by me as I like a collection where I have to revisit and maybe even do a bit of research.

My way of reading poetry is to read fairly quickly through the whole book once, not marking or noting anything, just getting a feel for the whole collection and how it builds and fits together (or doesn’t). Then I read the second time, slower, with a pen and I underline, I draw little stars on lines I want to revisit and I make notes beside words or references which I’ll need to look up. Then I read the notes etc on the third time through and look up what I need to. I put the book away (length of time depending on my TBR pile and how much I enjoyed it) and revisit again. At this stage I make notes in the front of the book with a date. When I revisit the book, months/years later I can get straight into the mindset and I may revisit the poems I struggled with to see if my understanding has changed. Often it has – as I mature as a poet and a reader.

The second reading of “The Saint of Milk and Flames” generated a lot of writing! Underlining beautiful lines, starring particularly interesting combinations and noting things I want to look up. Ms Garrett gives notes and explanations for some of the poems but 3 lines about a man horribly effected by the death of Joan of Arc, just left me wanting more. I love it when a poetry book does that to me. The need to know more so I can revisit the poem from a stronger position. There is a lot going on in this slim volume.

Poems about birth and death and every stage in between are interspersed with heart break or humour. There are several poems about babies, about looking after babies and the mistakes they sometimes are. One of my favourites is called “Late/1979” and has the lines:-

‘And his mother said, give the baby

to us, we’ll take care of it. And my mother

said, we’ll keep it, don’t come round here

or I’ll deck you, and my father cried at the table,

and I never wanted it.’

There is an entire season of a soap opera in those five lines. I see the girl’s parents and the young man’s mother sizing each other up and standing their ground while the young pregnant girl despairs. Heartbreaking and yet life affirming in a mere few words. Very skilful indeed.

Another poem concerns the end of pregnancy through an Appalachian granny witch, and another the end of child bearing via sterilisation.

‘…She ends your child-growing years for good,

for life and death reasons, and you feel the pinch and pressure

as she cuts off this handful of possibilities.’

How strong is that last phrase? ‘handful of possibilities’ is such a profound way to think about the lottery of birth.

There is a lot of family and strong emotions in this collection and it is difficult not to superimpose all of the feelings on to the poet because of the strength of the work but that is not necessary to enjoy the poetry and to quietly hope that no one goes through (or has gone through) this amount of heartbreak. Abortion, domestic violence, death, difficult mothers, miscarriage – universal traumas that will speak to many people.

Choosing individual lines or poems to focus on is difficult but needed to give a true sample of the depth of the emotion captured here. In ‘Happy’ referencing a woman who ‘almost had a son’, we learn:-

‘….She is happy.

Of course she is happy.

What else on earth could she be?’

I hear a relative answering a neighbour’s well-meant question. Slightly exasperated but moving on.

There are many real people and mythical people in here, too. Jeff Buckley – ‘…the songs all sound like love and mourning and I don’t know at the time that I already understand them both.’ This use of tense makes the line a jolt and emphasises the emotional hook. Gilles de Rais was the guy never the same after Joan of Arc died ‘angels and demons want the same things’. We have St Winifred, the Salem witches, Mother Shipton, Harry Houdini among many others.

The poems which resonated most with me are the ones which most mirror my own experience. A prose poem called ‘In the brown Camaro’ has a line ‘The other girls will wear neon and spandex, new leotards, but I’ll be wearing sweatpants six months too small.’ I totally get that measurement having often worn clothes like that (my mother loved the Bay City Rollers as she could add tartan to the bottom of my trousers and I’d get another six months out of them as I grew). And in ‘My mother sits in judgement of a nymph, a saint, and me’, the mother sits ‘unbalanced on her pedestal stacked with years of rot’ and reminds us that not all mothers are wonderful, life affirming women.

My favourite line is in a poem about the writer’s son being taken for an ECG (I have no idea if this reflects Ms Garrett’s lived experience) and finishes ‘people say follow your heart, but mine can’t read maps and its compass points south.’ I love that acerbic look at life and all its glories.

This book captures that acerbic nature beautifully while making you think, reflect and, more than once, give thanks. I can’t ask for much more than that no matter how many times I read it. Well done Ms Garrett, well done indeed.

Wings, a Moonlit Tale

Flashbacks followed each lunar phase; on these mornings,
change had occurred. Human form was never home,
nor was the house on the hill.

Home has wings—not arms, not walls. The forest knew
her spirit and summoned new moon for help. First quarter
waxed keenness of sight; full moon streamed scales

and song; last quarter waned beak, feathers, and wings.
Covered in pine boughs and dew, she awoke to drumming
sounds. Ruffed grouse beat with daybreak’s light.

Wings were the start of this day, and hers began to unfold.
As sun slipped between cedars, it warmed the forest floor.
Fern unfurled as bloodroot revealed its golden center.

She shook her fledgling feathers as strands of auburn
appeared, then dissolved in her remembrance. Transformed
in synodic month, the time had come. Forest smiled,

as she opened her wings, flew above bloodroot and fern,
soared over the house on the hill and sang, Home has wings—
not arms, not walls. Today, at last, my freedom calls!

Jeannie E. Roberts has authored six books, including The Wingspan of Things (Dancing Girl Press), Romp and Ceremony (Finishing Line Press), Beyond Bulrush (Lit Fest Press), and Nature of it All(Finishing Line Press). Her second children’s book, Rhyme the Roost!, was recently released by Kelsay Books.

Even Nature Grieves Your Passing

It’s raining as we silently march through sodden grounds to the plot where we will lay you to rest. Do you see how the gray sky weeps for your absence from this world? The birds did not sing their melodious songs this morning; silent were their whistles and chirps. Baby squirrels refrain from play. Lizards forsake morning push-ups, leaving territory unclaimed. See how the sun has hidden her face? She dares not give light to the emptiness of today. It’s raining and our gaze rests on your casket by the open grave. Soon you will be lowered into the earth. You are a flower we will plant, a flower that has already bloomed.

Arlene Antoinette writes poetry, flash fiction and song lyrics. She holds a B.A. in Sociology from Brooklyn College and worked with the disabled population for many years. Additional work by Arlene may be found at Your Daily Poem, Little Rose Magazine, Foxglove Journal, London Grip, Neologism Poetry Review and Mojave Heart.