Amethyst Review

‘HOW TO HANDLE THE MYSTICS’

Reduce the images to art.
Let there be nothing inspiring
or powerful about them.

No one should sing or dance.
Encourage them to be silent.

Rationalise everything. It is
the effect of architecture or colour,
an early example of surrealism,
myth, magic or dream.

I am walking through Google maps
and visiting churches in advance,
looking at annunciations and icons,
saints and miracles everywhere.

I do my best not to believe
but the churches are dark and cool.

You are in the shadow and the light,
the paint, the dust and air.
I wonder at what got left behind.

© Rupert M Loydell

(The title is from Thomas Merton)

Rupert Loydell is a writer, editor and abstract artist. His many books of poetry include Dear Mary (Shearsman, 2017) and The Return of the Man Who Has Everything (Shearsman 2015); and he has edited anthologies such as Yesterday’s Music Today (co-edited with Mike Ferguson, Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2014), and Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh: manifestos and unmanifestos (Salt, 2010).

On being asked if I share the gospel with my students

I know I’m not getting any of this guy’s money.
Because this is the missionary equation —
I with my presentation and my worn out
shoes, a life honed to a single point.

He with the presumption that he’s sending me,
like a spy or a timebomb, into the forsaken
darkness, like a single ember bright-lit
in a censer swung across the map.

His is a gospel of nets. Of capture. His is the gospel
that asks, If you died tonight, do you know for sure
you’d go to heaven? A gospel of the escape
route, the secret doorway, the cheat.

I can speak his language like a native, but can’t
quite find a way to tell him, I am no ember.
That mine is a gospel of tanks
rusting in the snow, a gospel of grass

growing over the place they massacred
their neighbors. A gospel of guard shacks peeling
off their paint. A gospel of old songs being sung
in the tavern, of year by year clear water filling up

the empty missile silo, of new bricks
making straight the rough streets.

ON THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THE SACRED AND POETRY

I have always questioned why all religions of the world have spiritual books that form the tenets of their respective faiths. And I think that as I continue to write poetry, I get clearer in my understanding of the interconnectivity of the divine and the art of writing.

“In the beginning, God spoke a word…”

One of the very first introductions to God in the Christian Bible is that He is pro-speech, which will mean He is pro-words, which will mean He is pro-writing, which will also mean He is pro-poetry. I think this is the source of that now hackneyed maxim: “God is a poet”. And however over-used that maxim may be, it will always hold water.

I believe writing can be a pathway into the divine. I define “divine” here within the context of my own Christian faith; and I say this without casting aspersion on others. For I can not speak of what I do not know— whether they be gods or thrones or dominions or voices upon the earth. I can only truly speak of that which I know.

I do not know if I have been able to communicate some sense hitherto, but I will like to conclude on this note: writing is as physical as is spiritual. I have had a number of epiphanies while writing, where my soul was suspended in a world not terrestrial. I do think it’s a journey of a lifetime to fully understand this connection between art and sacredness. There is a sacredness of art, and as long as we keep writing, we are journeying into the full knowledge of this.

Kolawole Samuel Adebayo is an old soul in a young Nigerian body whose poems seek to awaken the human consciousness. His poems have appeared or forthcoming in Glass Poetry, Button Poetry, Burning House Press, Anti-Heroin Chic Magazine, Eunoia Review, PRAXIS Magazine, Mojave Heart Review, Tuck Magazine, WRR, BPPC anthology, and elsewhere. He likes to connect with his friends via his Twitter handle, @samofthevoice.

Soliloquy

At the river,
God is the face
Looking back at me
From the water.
And God cries if I cry,
And God smiles if I smile,
And what I do is what God would do.
And God will do nothing if I do nothing.

Kolawole Samuel Adebayo is an old soul in a young Nigerian body whose poems seek to awaken the human consciousness. His poems have appeared or forthcoming in Glass Poetry, Button Poetry, Burning House Press, Anti-Heroin Chic Magazine, Eunoia Review, PRAXIS Magazine, Mojave Heart Review, Tuck Magazine, WRR, BPPC anthology, and elsewhere. He likes to connect with his friends via his Twitter handle, @samofthevoice.

Vapor

I inhale vapor, straight into the ears. The tunes make me tingle. I wonder if this moment in time will be remembered fondly, if time travelers might find the reality somewhat meaningful. I wonder a lot with tunes in my ears. I wonder the future. Does such a word exist for me and those who look like me? I wonder these thoughts among permitted tunes. Sometimes I cannot decipher tune from thought and in those times I wish to be sleeping. Yet I always find myself existing. In which my dreams and tunes are closely intertwined like a helix, wrapping so fluidly, intangible suit. My DNA is almost completely vapor now, vaporized. I know that one day I will evaporate. I hope I sound quite beautiful in the air.

Rickey Rivers Jr was born and raised in Alabama. He is a writer and cancer survivor. His stories and poems have appeared in various publications and are forthcoming in Picaroon Poetry, Dodging the Rain, Neon Mariposa (among other publications). Twitter.com/storiesyoumight / https://storiesyoumightlike.wordpress.com/

Unfinished Aquarelle

Clouds roll, flow, curl and unfurl in volutes,
lazy smoke escaping speechless lips.
A gentle puff presses the dawdling buzzard.
Essence of rain, diffuse in chalky blue,
soaks into stretched canvas, as light as gauze.
Ash trees, forgotten paintbrushes of dark days
splay stiff bristles into the winter sky;
cold decants by soft degrees in the combe.

The breeze runs waves over grey needled grass;
the last late-hanging leaves rustle and turn.
Wind, like a breaker, falls; the shudder of its surge
transfixes the pale sun and lifts the buzzard up
into the haze. Tints shift: fugitive liquid gaze,
unfathomable iris, flyleaf of the soul.

After studying French, Jane Angué now lives and works in France, teaching English Language and Literature. She enjoys introducing her students to poetry.  She writes in French and English, was longlisted for the Erbacce Prize 2018 and her work has recently appeared in incertain regard, Le Capital des Mots and Dawntreader.

Persistence

As the street rises closer
the wind falling

leaning to the window­
she watches.

Stepping to the mirror
taking in all she’s become—
something is already gone.

Gravity and time must be the story;
strength,
the music causing her smile.

Anyway,
that’s what we do.

Trying

left-right, early-late,
setting off for another there.

The horizon,
a goal not always ahead, may
slip the lead, follow
or move beside.

Yesterday, today and tomorrow
that’s what we do

trying…
the best we can.

Judy DeCroce, a former teacher, is a poet/flash fiction writer whose work has been published in Cherry House Press: An Anthology (Upcoming April, 2019) Pendora Magazine, The Sunlight Press, Nightingale & Sparrow, riverbabble, Nixes Mate Review, Pilcrow & Dagger, Red Eft Review, Front Porch Review, Amethyst Review, An Upstate of Mind, as well as Palettes & Quills, and Writers & Books.  She is a professional, storyteller and teacher of that genre.  Judy lives and works in upstate New York with her husband, writer Antoni Ooto.

On the Ongoing Insistence on Proof

I’d seen the painting before. As I stood in front
of Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas,

I again took note of the glow bathing the figures
from just outside the left edge, and the ambiguous,

black background; the lack of a halo above Jesus’
head and the solidness of his flesh; the two other

disciples craning to get a better look; the hunched-
over Thomas receiving exactly what he demanded,

his forefinger knuckle-deep in his friend’s side,
feeling the warm tissue between his ribs. Thomas’s

other hand clutches his own side, as if the Roman spear
pierced him too, the wrinkles in his forehead undulating

into sandy dunes of shock, regret, astonishment, elation,
wonder; his wide eyes staring past Jesus, thinking some
unknown thought—

……………………….I stepped back. It was quite a moving scene,
……………………….really. Though I doubt it ever happened.

I suppose Thomas claimed he needed to use his fingers
as the nails and spearhead before belief, and who

can blame him? After all, the hill had been so far off,
his palms pressed to his eyes; he couldn’t be sure of

anything he’d seen that day. Remarkable though,
how swiftly those thunderheads had dissolved, how

his friend is standing before him now—never mind
the locked door—with color in his cheeks and breath

in his lungs, gesturing, while sunbeams scud across
the dusty floor, shouting with light, inching ever closer.

Ben Groner III (Nashville, TN), recipient of Texas A&M University’s 2014 Gordone Award for undergraduate poetry and a Pushcart Prize nomination, has work published in Appalachian Heritage, New Mexico Review, Third Wednesday, Gnarled Oak, The Bookends Review, Gravel, and elsewhere. You can see more of his work at bengroner.com/creative-writing/

Prayer for a bridled mind

I want to be free range, to lope in the wake
of wind kissing me good morning, as if nothing
besides my alignment
with the slow turning earth
matters. I yearn to know in my marrow
the immense truth of this “as if”
a place of being
louder than any ringing phone, ticking clock
in my head, my slice of our collective
clamor.
Thoughts would soften into wordless sensing while
words, when used, could take flight
from a place wholly foreign
to small dimensions of logic or prescribed
meaning. We could say what
we can’t now, what can’t
even be thought.
I would like to shed the belief that anything
is obvious and swim in
a fluid in-between where everything emerges and
fades, all ultimately unknowable and yet
so delicious to explore, co-invent
and witness. I could
discard the need to understand, agree
or disagree and live
unbridled.

Jenny has lived in the Pacific Northwest for 13 years having moved here from the New York metropolitan area with her family.   By day she is an international tax lawyer, but day and night, a poet, loving to write poems and share with anyone who will read them.  Her work has been in included as part of the yearly Bainbridge Island Poetry Corners celebration in which poems are posted on local storefronts, Ars Poetica, a juried pairing of poems with the work of local artists, several anthologies published by Diversion Press, two publications out of the Grief Dialogues project, “Just a Little More Time” and “Grief Dialogues, the book”, The Cascade Journal Vol. II, of the Washington Poets Association and others.

Ganesh

Beloved Ganesh, elephant-headed Lord
of Letters, you who penned Vyasa’s epic,
the Mahabharata, I call on you—
if I may be so bold: be my scribe.
Coil your eloquent trunk around the moon
and hold it overhead to light our work.
Dip your single, most auspicious tusk
into your deepest, darkest pot of ink.

Light candles, burn incense, sweep away the dust.
Trumpet Om. Write my words on all
the rivers, lakes, and oceans of the world.
Scatter them to the winds, the fields, the stars.
Whatever spirals back, intact, inscribe
it on the heart and mind of humankind.

John W. Steele is a psychologist, yoga teacher and graduate of the MFA Poetry Program at Western Colorado University, where he studied with Julie Kane, Ernest Hilbert and David Rothman. His poetry has appeared in Amethyst Review, Boulder Weekly, Blue Unicorn, The Lyric, Society of Classical Poets and Verse-Virtual. One of his poems was nominated for a 2017 Pushcart prize, another won The Lyric’s 2017 Fall Quarterly Award.