Amethyst Review

In Waiting

I breathe in then, feel the winter noon sun
glaze the waxing glass of the hospital’s
anteroom, trailing chills in its low run

through the city. Glaring long at white walls
bare of light and art and icons who might
have soothed my rage with their numinous calls

to the skies, I turn to watch nurses, whose night
and morning blur sleepless, see cut and break
as mercuries of pain. I sit, stand, right

my left, drown in coffee as my hands shake,
grasping air. I dare speak but never hoist
our clawing fear, share souvenirs that make

our eyes and lips flicker though not rejoice—
and maybe won’t again. Then, I breathe out,
confess that contemplation is a choice,

refuse its consolation for your sake,
or so I claim. Messengers return, voice
nothing, no word nor prophecy to slake

this madness: here, the sincere text seems trite,
the kind call like ice, sympathy an ache
half-dressed. I am become an anchorite

insulated from warmth as my life stalls
out, treading shattered glass. New shadows fright
the room, new spirits search me through the halls

to pierce this sacrilege. You grip my thigh, stun
my paralysis as the stale air falls
and some strange scent hints something’s been undone.

Joshua S. Fullman is Professor of English and Director of the Writing Center at California Baptist University where he teaches composition and creative writing. His recent book, Voices of Iona (Wipf and Stock, 2022), is a poetry collection of an American expatriate living in the British Isles.

Tektōn

The air turns in a wheel of dust and gold
as it falls through an open window.
His hands leave furrows in the dirt, and 
as water forms the clay, 
remnants spin around Him, a lingering shimmer
of pensive pirouettes.

The chipped bark of His skin
is scraped, and rugged, and steady
as He moves from shaped earth
to felled tree. 
A tangle of driftwood hums
its psalm of war-washed splinters,
of rivers running deep, and desperately
dark.

He listens
with the very tips of His weathered fingers,
              listens 
with the dust and the dawn-sun, which 
still falls, still spins
from the golden pool of His open window.

He listens, and 
His listening Makes. 

Kimberly Beck is a poet from Washington State. She can often be found at a local therapy ranch, caring for a very special herd of Norwegian Fjord Horses. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Solid Food Press, Ekstasis Magazine, and Clayjar Review.

Nighttime Thoughts on the Mountain

After Du Fu

A soft wind combs the tall grass;
A white oak pierces the Tennessee sky;

Constellations drip silver rain on the meadow;
The moon rises over the domain’s plateau.  

Every song I’ve written remains unsung:
Aging poets like me should shut up and listen.

Yet I keep squawking, a mockingbird 
Stranded between shoveled earth and bright sky. 

Richard Collins is abbot of the New Orleans Zen Temple and lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, where he leads Stone Nest Zen Dojo. His recent poetry, which has been nominated for Best Spiritual Literature and a Pushcart Prize, appears in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, MockingHeart Review, Pensive, Sho Poetry Journal, Think, Urthona: Buddhism and the Arts, and Willows Wept Review. His books include No Fear Zen (Hohm Press). a translation of Taisen Deshimaru’s Autobiography of a Zen Monk (Hohm Press), and In Search of the Hermaphrodite (Tough Poets Press, 2024).

A Thousand Hallelujahs

I saw a man in the grocery store who had a black smudge in the center of his forehead. A woman passing him in the canned goods aisle stopped to tell him about the dirt on his face. As she gestured to his forehead with a swiping motion, he erupted in an angry outburst that sent us both rocking backwards on our heels.

“It’s Ash Wednesday, heathen! Get some religion!” Everyone froze and watched him stomp away, his back rounded like a cat, his bent neck wagging back and forth like a parent scolding a disobedient child.

Thirty years later as I stand in the church’s opulent sanctuary, I remember the look of scorned shame on that woman’s face. I didn’t console her. I offered no retort, no comfort, no relief. I wanted to, but I had no way to process what had just happened. I wasn’t even sure I knew what the word “heathen” meant. But I was fairly sure I was one of them. Her shame was my shame.

Now, as I hold the bell in my right hand and use the left hand to hold the hymnal, I think about the candlelight ceremony forty days ago when the Lent season began on Ash Wednesday. The pastor had instructed us to write on a piece of paper something we wanted to give to God, some sin that haunted us that we would crumple in our fists and burn in the large crucible at the altar. One by one, we walked forward, opening our fists and dropping our sins into the flames, watching the smoke rise as they burned. We solemnly waited for the elders to dip their thumbs into the ash, making the sign of the cross on our foreheads. I wasn’t sure if it was the smell of lighter fluid or the sign of repentance on my forehead that made me lightheaded as I returned to my seat empty handed. Had I really let go of bitterness that easily? Was my struggle with pride and selfishness so abruptly reduced to ashes?

For the next forty days, I fasted from movies and sugar as I was instructed to remember Jesus’ fasting in the desert, his resisting Satan’s temptation. But truthfully, it wasn’t hard for me to live with such discipline because for decades, Anorexia had taught me to restrict everything good in life. No one was more disciplined than me about the rule of not saying “Alleluia” during Lent. I made a Lent-approved playlist that included only Alleluia-free songs. Fasting the use of the word was supposed to intensify its meaning and remind us that an incredible joy awaits us in heaven.

The man in the grocery store would certainly be impressed with my determination, my steadfast commitment to the rules.

On Easter morning, the choir sang the Hallelujah chorus. A thousand bells rang each time the blessed word was sung. In every hand, young and old, students and lawyers and construction workers and moms, a bell became a powerful weapon against despair, and we wielded their power like only the forgiven can.

Nothing prepared me for the feelings that washed over me like a baptismal wave, the unrestrained joy ofanticipating the collective ringing of bells and the sound of a thousand hallelujahs pouring out of grateful hearts, swelling and rising to the rafters.

I was not prepared to feel the depth of emotion that tackles me, leaving me speechless with mascara stinging my eyes and staining my cheeks. I have never experienced anything like it before. But then, I’ve never been a Presbyterian during the penitential season of Lent either.

Part of me always understood it was never about the ashes, the playlists, or the bells. But it sure felt good to approach God from such lofty heights. I mean, the alternative was humbling myself to see the weakness of my humanity in the presence of holiness. I was not quite ready for that. Until I heard the bells.

I think about the woman in the grocery store often. I hope she knows how deep and how wide God’s unfailing love for her is, and how sorry I am that I didn’t know to tell her. I think about that man in the grocery store often. I hope he knows how deep and how wide God’s unfailing love for him is, and how sorry I am that I didn’t know to tell him.

Tracie Adams is a writer and teacher in rural Virginia. Pushcart nominee 2025. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in BULL, Does It Have Pockets, Cleaver Magazine, Bright Flash Literary Review, Cool Beans Lit, and others. Read her work at http://www.tracieadamswrites.com and follow her on Twitter @1funnyfarmAdams.

Our Lady of the Ridge

I First meeting

In a forest of undoing, a maple grew and grew for 80 years or more, gracefully pregnant above a west-facing slope; she is only an upright trunk now, still in elegant skirts with her sweet swayback and tender protruding belly swollen from years of growing up within gravity’s pull on this steep and holy ridge. Three parts of her, each thick as a mature tree, once met and extended from her neck. Now they lie behind, below, beside, where they collapsed on a terribly windy night with only stumps for arms that rest fingerless of extending leaf or bud. Redwing blackbirds flock to discuss their spring dissemination; saplings crowd her remains while animal prints approach her body from below. She is empty, hollow, losing her skin. All this personification, all this chronicling of undoing! The blackbirds quiet and begin again, cranes saw sound into the ground from above, robins interject a melody. I take care and walk on with my stick.

II Return  

Drawn back, I rest on one of her three children—no, these trunk-like limbs were part of her, but aren’t they? Our children? Mine, themselves graying and sustaining me; hers, sprouting mushrooms, growing moss. From this angle, our maple matriarch appears to be looking down the ridge, a large gnarl at her trunk top, a protuberance—her head hanging, an old woman with one remaining limb extending blessing, calling out for what it is worth, for all she is worth. Am I projecting? Rain condenses drops of cool humidity, a distant red squirrel clucks the seconds in the maple grove, the maple graveyard. Always before, I sought the oldest living tree, but this substantive specter with graceful rooted skirts, pregnant swayback belly, craggy open back, crone’s head, and outstretched arm is speaking to me about how lives move on and on and on with nowhere to go and always somewhere to be.

III Your aspirant

Mosquitos hum their high-pitched hymn. I am back sitting below, this time on your south side upon your two-pronged daughter with her fungi frill. I see perforations in your bark, fresh pileated woodpecker holes bleeding sawdust on your skirts, and a high-placed umbilicus, the scarred site of a lost limb—no, an eye, a portal into fathomless black darkness. I allow myself to be seen and drawn in. Another hole, two-thirds moon, larger than any other and open to the sky. I’m certain this is your heart, the organic curve, a bark circle halved, concave, radiant unstained glassless green light beyond. I aspire to such a transparent heart. I have become your aspirant. I sit that you may see me and my tangled 70 years with your elephantine eye. I sit with you in our patience, yours holding mine. Is this a pastoral poem? Objectifying, fantasizing? No, this is alchemy. You engulf me in your black-eyed, tender gaze. In time, I will head down the ridge inside cicadas’ waves of rattle and through the web of humid haze to the cabin, car, highway, and town, but I’ll remain in your velvety black line of sight with the breath of air and a shaft of green light in the cave of my heart.

Susan Mary Freiss writes poetry because she hears many things in listening to everyday and pervasive silence. When she records what she hears and listens for more, she learns. She is a mother, grandmother, gardener, teacher, and activist in Madison, Wisconsin. Her poem “Below and Beyond War” is posted on the Madison Vets for Peace website.

When a Child Asks His Grandmother a Simple Question

The boy asks me what my favorite color is
and his mother tells him I like black
because it represents death,
which he cannot comprehend.
But no—I love much more 
than the absence of color,
The absence of light
showcases pinprick shimmers
only visible when the sun flees
or we flee from it. This is why 
I thrill in the gift of black, for all 
that would be obscured without it, 
like the face of God in the star Regulus, 
divinity held in a telescope
a boy’s hand is too small to hold.

Claudia M. Stanek’s work has been turned into a libretto, been part of an art exhibition, and been translated into Polish. She is the author of the chapbooks Language You Refuse to Learn (BHP, 2014) and Beneath Occluded Shine (FLP, 2025). Her poems appear in Susurrus, The Windhover, Cutleaf, Ekstasis, Solum, and Book of Matches. Claudia spent a Writer’s Residency in Bialystok, Poland. She holds an MFA from Bennington College. After a lifetime in the frozen tundra of Western New York, Claudia now lives in East Tennessee with her elderly dogs, where she also rescues the occasional overheated hummingbird.

In the Shadow of Eternity

Their twigs shall be broken off untimely…
		Wisdom 4:5


Time, she said, is more accordion 
Than tree. Its bellows expand,
Compress, according to whimsical
Tripping, tapping squeezebox
Rhythms. Riffs, played well 
Or poorly. Who’s to say? 
Then closing up. Resuming 
A black box aura of mystery. 
Unlike your average tree, with
Its seasonal moods, its frequent 
Periods of death-like pause. How,
When you cut it down, there
On its trunk, easy to see, 
It was marking time all the while,
The way we like, linear,
In a roundabout kind of way. 

Maryanne Hannan has published poetry in both All Shall Be Well: A poetry anthology for Julian of Norwich and Thin Places & Sacred Spaces. A resident of upstate New York, USA, she is the author of Rocking Like it’s all Intermezzo: 21st Century Responsorials.

A Window Shalt Thou Make to the Ark
(From Genesis 6:16)

First days, and out our one window, water whipped, 
the twisting brawn of sycamore scrawls its gray-white grief 
across the red alluvium of sky; the sky turns gully, 
gravid green, pounding into blear spires of black:  
pines stripped bare, tired verticals we have to trust 
but know not if they’ll snap and smash us. Or, 
if we’ll smash them, or — for this one hour, at least — 
we’ll be hurled unharmed beyond. Housed hollow, 
how we pitch and roll, crash and groan. And lumber on. 
No — we bob. We’re meager, mini; the horned ones, 
snorting ones — even they go flying tiny with us 
through a sea that’s all around, within, on top of, one with 
this brilliant covenantal square of writhing sky.

Kelli Logan Rush lives in her native city of Winston-Salem, N.C., where she worked in the corporate world as a writer and web manager for the tobacco industry. Her poems have appeared in the Southern Poetry Review, Plainsongs, The Orchards Poetry Journal, The Delta Review and Third Street Writers, among others. Her interests include local music, home and garden, atomic-era style and U.S. East Coast travel. She has an MA in European history.

Humming a Blessing

This blur of a blessing darts
left, right, up, down,
an iridescent gyroscope 
hungry for nectar.
It hovers, adjusts pitch and yaw,
then divebombs you in a rufous
dervish of feathers reflecting 
turquoise motes of sunlight.

For a frenetic breath it perches,
dips its slender straw once, 
twice, three times, gulping 
syrupy tincture before 
accelerating into aspen tops.

When it returns, it comes not
single spies but in battalions,
dozens of topaz, sapphire, ruby, 
emerald blessings that encircle
you with trills of wonder, 
a glissando of glory that
fills you even as they 
drain you dry.

Amy Nemecek is the author of The Language of the Birds (Paraclete Press, 2022), which was awarded the Paraclete Poetry Prize. Her work has also appeared in Presence, Whale Road Review, Windhover, and Last Leaves. She enjoys taking long walks in nature, preferably near a creek or river.

The pink years

For decades I’d watch you
with window eyes, through 
branches of blue birds and 
hailstorms at high noon, when
I feared you'd root up just like
Dorothy's house, from the same
earth that held you. This, as
I starred in my own melodrama...
the pink years, the lapsed years and
years marking deep in the marrow 
believing that you felt me too
in the curve of your cradling bough.

When not writing poetry, Emalisa Rose enjoys crafting with macrame. She volunteers in animal rescue tending to cat colonies in the neighborhood. She walks with a birding group on weekends. Living by a beach town, is inspiration for her art and poetry. Some of her poems have appeared in Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Amethyst Review, The Rye Whiskey Review. Her latest collection is Ten random wrens, published by Maverick Duck Press.