Amethyst Review

A ROSY CROSS

A Bach fugue has the crucifixion in it.
—Grygöry Kurtág

You do not see him coming—his slow hands
heavy with nails. His long face stays hidden
beneath a black hood. His hammer’s just blunt—
nothing else. You stay stretched out and he stands
behind you. His breath provides the constant
beat. Time doesn’t count. It meets—here—its end.

This moment, though serious, touches light
with pale fingers and tickles you to joy—
the joy of numbers that hold square and true
to a hammer’s voice. The nail scratches you
like God’s kiss and now your sound’s perfect toy.
The pain’s built of delicate notes in flight.

Your flesh is pierced sharply—square on the beat.
Prayer must be like this. It always asks you
to hand over more than you have. The work
is joy but the melody you hear defeats
your fingers—blunt nails, warm flesh. You jerk
your hands away. Count time: One. Two. One, two…

 

Mark J. Mitchell’s novel, The Magic War appeared from Loose Leaves Publishing. He studied  at Santa Cruz under Raymond Carver and George Hitchcock. His work appeared in several anthologies and hundreds of periodicals. He lives with his wife, Joan Juster making his living pointing out pretty things in San Francisco. A meager online presence can be found at https://www.facebook.com/MarkJMitchellwriter/

 

Europa

Europa spews water in prismed plumes
erupting into space.

Moon goddess, icy-faced,
she circles her bull-god, the abducting lover.

He is drawn to her, iron to her magnet,
but she keeps her distance in this ancient contrapuntal dance.

Our past, our future,
she whispers
 
in shadows and light
in language with the smooth smell of ever-

never and if—
just beyond understanding

she aches music,
dripping harmony into diamond showers

while we dream
of floating in a cerulean sea,

the whisper in its slipstream–
our past, our future.

 

*“Icy Moon of Jupiter Spews Water into Space”
Morning Edition, NPR, May 14, 2018

 

 

Merril D. Smith is an independent scholar with a Ph.D. in American History and numerous books on history and gender issues. Her poetry and stories have appeared recently in Rhythm & Bones, Vita Brevis, Streetlight Press, Ghost City, Twist in Time, and Mojave Heart Review. Her blog is at merrildsmith.com.

The evening wind rises,

weaves through the strings
of the worn guitar
leaning against the open door
in this room far from home,
strokes the darkening walls
with remembered song.

Do you feel the curve,
the deepening center?

No bedrock,
but so many carved alcoves.

 

M.S. Rooney lives in Sonoma, California with poet Dan Noreen. Her work appears in journals, including Leaping Clear, Ekphrasis, Heron Tree, Naugatuck River Review and Soul-Lit, and anthologies, including American Society: What Poets See (FutureCycle Press), edited by David Chorlton and Robert S. King, and Ice Cream Poems (World Enough Writers), edited by Patricia Fargnoli. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

INVOCATION

What is the function of invocation, what
do we hope to achieve? Grotesque rituals
as a form of ghost dance, dodgy seances
with incoherent messages from the dead,
do not constitute a resurrection machine.

When people listen to themselves what
do they hear? Years of silence, whispers
of brutality and inner selves. Help us
to reconfigure and confuse, to stay alive
and respond to the command interface

you specify. Death is a Möbius strip
of lies and decay, so what keeps you
going now you have abandoned life?
Emails from the living, kind eulogies,
and traces of self-evident decay.

In the beginning we invoke the one,
but now we are struggling to breathe.
What is the function of elucidation,
transformation, the idea of the divine?
Something to cling on to as we die.

© Rupert M Loydell

 

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).

Synecdoche

So much of her voice is in me,
It’s like our family is a real living organism,
Each appendage is one of us,
Me, my wife, my son, and my daughter.

She smiles even when she’s sick.
Ever-courageous, she tumbles through the threshold,
Shoes on the wrong feet, bottle in hand,
A shriek of joy silences the masses.

She asks for more milk to drink than she can handle,
Ever-doubtful, she mistrusts even herself,
But I’ve seen her climb up into her car seat
As if it were her Everest.

I let her fall a little,
So, she practices how to get back up.
I think what people mean when they say to learn to get back up
Is you should learn how to fall first without it breaking you.

 

Alexander P. Garza is a writer, actor, and educator from Houston, TX. His work can be seen in Nine Muses Poetry(forthcoming), Magnolia Review (forthcoming), Little Rose Magazine (forthcoming), Ariel Chart, Literal Magazine, and Broadway World Houston. He has worked on and offstage at The Alley Theatre, Houston Grand Opera, Main Street Theater, and Mildred’s Umbrella Theatre Company. Visit him on Instagram/Twitter, @alexanderpgarza, and on his website http://www.alexanderpgarza.com.

The Opposite of Stars

1.
Grieving you is terrible work because I don’t know how to do it. Light pours into the room like stale tea between blinds gnawed through by the frustrated cat unable to go outside. There are teeth holes and claw holes in the white, enough holes to be the opposite of stars.

2.
I make mushroom tea, watch the ground volva float then catch in the strainer like silverfish. I force its spine down my throat, wait for the wriggling to start.

3.
Grieving is self-induced ritual, or has become self-induced ritual, after it was natural. Enough years have passed that people don’t want your name on my lips anymore. I imagine what your young body must look like now in the ground. Are you skull and hair? Are you vertebrae and nails? It’s smart to subscribe to religion that describes the soul—what the body becomes, to earth, to bugs, is unbearable and unforgiving.

4.
I chug the hot juice of smaller gods faster, scald the architecture of self, brutalist. Here is the heart made geometric, concrete, an institution. Here is the brain, simple and utilitarian.

5.
Until frogsong croaks in nighttime reverie, masks street traffic, marital arguments, the neighbor’s crated terrier.

6.
I went into this thinking I’d resolve death as if by magic.

7.
Dendrochronology reveres trees. Who above listens to the chatter of teeth?

 

Alia Hussain Vancrown has published in journals and magazines in print and online. Her poetry has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She was selected to participate in Winter Tangerine’s 2018 workshop, Singing Songs Crooning Comets, featuring seminars by Kaveh Akbar and Aricka Foreman. Alia works at the Library of Congress in the Law Division. She currently resides in Maryland. For more, please visit www.aliahussainvancrown.com and Instagram @aliagoestothelibrary.

The Flying Cage

I saw a flying iron cage, yes, the bars
were round as I saw the silhouette and there was an iron
desk in it and a chair of iron to sit on.

All the things were patterned as grills, so
I could see through them from my terrace as the cage flew
high in the sky. The night was dark around

the cage and I had no time to check whether any moon
gave its light anywhere. I had no time,
as I was busy calling my children from downstairs

to come watch that quaint thing with me. No, it was not
magic, the orange glow that showed the cage
to me below came from the fire from under

the balloon that lifted it. No, my children did not
join me to witness the spectacle and to make it complete as,
the man that sat at the desk just opened the door

of the cage
and jumped,
bungee style.

 

Rajnish Mishra is a poet, writer, translator and blogger born and brought up in Varanasi, India and now in exile from his city. His work originates at the point of intersection between his psyche and his city. He edits PPP Ezine.

Poem for A Viral Video

— After the Icelandic Heyr himna smiður

The song reminds you
it might be possible to endure.
That the sun can go dark,
swallowed by wolves,
eaten by snow, but a melody
burrows or is knit
into the ground like a taproot
might rise to the surface
of throats earth has not
yet imagined, might resurrect
in an echo as trains rumble by
or in some place of transit
between this world and
the next. That whatever
is lost is not lost. That
whatever is kept
keeps its own secret
life, that your body’s
a chamber, a channel,
a mead hall
for music beyond
what you know.

 

Jen Stewart Fueston lives in Longmont, Colorado. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of journals, most recently Ruminate, Rock & Sling, and The St. Katherine Review. Her poems have twice been finalists for the McCabe poetry prize, and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her first chapbook, “Visitations,” was published in 2015, and her second, “Latch,” will be released in early 2019. She has taught writing at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as well as internationally in Hungary, Turkey, and Lithuania.

Let the Rain Possess Me

Stars fading, a margin of sky clears
as clouds spill from the west.
Miles of blue for a week, warmest winter
on record, but now darkness swells,
shares a remnant of moon with gray dawn.

Black caps tapping at the feeder, chickadees
feint with goldfinches for the best fruit, seed.
The bluebirds never left, January so much
like early April. They just fluff and rustle
in the water, chatter to squirrels who burst
the length of hickory branches, leaves dried
and crackling but still hanging on.

Hanging on to joy, even with storms
moving in. They scrabble and loop the bark —
and the chase is on as drops scatter the yard
then more until silver hazes,  erases me.

 

 

KB Ballentine’s fifth collection, Almost Everything,
Almost Nothing, was published in 2017 by Middle Creek Publishing.
Published in Crab Orchard Review and Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal,
among others, her work also appears in anthologies including In Plein
Air (2017) and Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace (2017).
Learn more at www.kbballentine.com.