Amethyst Review

Heartfast
after the visions of Catherine of Siena

The color of beloved is red. I’ve bathed in it, his lambsblood—
	worn his foreskin ‘round my
finger; what better gift is there for a lordsbride than four 
	wounds: father, son, holy spirit—I
knifed my hair, threw food in the fire, wrapped my mother’s
	wishes ‘round the legs of fledglings 
	and shoved
	them from the nest.

If the mind is a cell, then what is a heart? A pyre made by blue
	wefts, palm-eerie, so easily snuck out
of a chest. I neglected it—scarletstone of my own, I prayed
	for hollowness, for the whirl of ashes,
prayed for cleanness notyetseen. Christ-beloved planted a thrum
	with his thumb. His holy heart so hot—
	wanted by all 
	but buried in me. 
.
I try to speak of it, but the tongue does not know this dance. I
	can show you, instead, my flesh: ribscar 
smiling beneath my breast. Touch these bones after I am dead.
	Starlight is but a dew drop compared
to God’s love, hot. I spend hours seeking to name it. My heart. 
	My whispering bloodpeach. Christ
	tells it a secret
	before he hides it in his sleeve.
 

Kale Hensley is a West Virginian by birth and a poet by faith. You can keep up with them at kalehens.com.

Shrine

The deeper in our cave we go, the more
the nature of a shrine comes clear. A house
on stilts, a cabin on a Blue Ridge slope,
a lodge in view of Everest, the same.
A wikiup, a yurt, a sidewalk tent,
the same. A white house, red house, blue house: shrines,
cenotaphs, and sometime mausoleums.
Some people think of them as coliseums
where rivalries play out, bright armor shines
and clashes until every strength is spent.
Some people light a candle, watch the flame,
see promise in it or, at least, a hope
for friend or sibling, parent, child, or spouse.
I feed the fire to hear the heartwood roar.

Dan Campion’s poems have appeared previously in Amethyst Review. He is the author of A Playbill for Sunset (Ice Cube Press, 2022), The Mirror Test (MadHat Press, 2024), and the monograph Peter De Vries and Surrealism (Bucknell University Press, 1995). He is a coeditor of the anthology Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (Holy Cow! Press, 1981; 2nd ed. 1998; 3rd ed. 2019). His poetry has appeared in Able Muse, Light, Measure, Poetry, Rolling Stone, Shenandoah, THINK, and many other journals.

Neo Native

They leave as soon as they have stretched
and purchased gasoline and maybe food

at truck stops on the interstate.
“It’s hot –  can we go now?” is all the children say,

confirming what they all agree –
they cannot wait to leave.

I was like them once.  I came and

smelled the heat-perspiring rocks
and saw the overwhelming sun.

Blind to arid beauty,
I could not see the desert for the sand –

the cactus for the thorn.
But as I stayed, I saw the desert’s soul unwind

in days of warm abounding light
and nights of sapphire dark,

with bright … unnumbered … myriads … of stars.
I came to see that I am of this land –

that I am also made of dust.

Richard West was Regents’ Professor of Classics in a large public university and has published numerous books, articles, and poems under his own name and other pen names. He now lives with his wife Anna in the beautiful American Desert Southwest, where he enjoys cooking and attempting to add flavor to his poems.

While in the Yorkshire Dales

After our meal of pulled pork and apple pie,
thick-cut chips and wilted greens, sated
to the marrow, we discovered still more–
outside, beside a swath of nodding daffodils–
a stepping stone bridge over gurgling waters.  
We skipped, laughing, across to the other side,
a trail that wound through a moss haven of woods,
along a drystone fence to the highest hill
where we stopped.  There, on top,
one massive sheep, poised like an empress,
detached and magnificent.  Solitary, she
regarded us.  We could hardly go 
any further as we watched her 
move not once from her wild throne.  

Andrea Potos is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently HER JOY BECOMES (Fernwood Press), and MARROW OF SUMMER (Kelsay Books.)

The Temple 

A lone bystander by a corner store
observing morning mourners haul great loads
to offices, their eight-hour, loathed abodes.
Those usual faces from the day before.

It meekly waits, inviting amblers in
to have an honest, though succinct, discourse
with The Advisor, who can quell the force
of peace-eroding rivers born within.

Even a vagrant's faded handkerchief
spread on the footpath halts some rapid feet,
but these wide-open, holy doors just greet
the sunbeams, wind, its emptiness, and grief.

Today, a doddering, cane-supported pair
expelled the sorrow of its sacred hall
by offering Jasmine flowers and lighting small
oil lamps. The bells' peals drifting through the air

turned eyes towards this temple's newborn smile.
Devotion births devotion; hence, a few
fleet-footed joined this couple's worship too,
and everything was tranquil for a while.

Shamik Banerjee is a poet from Assam, India, where he resides with his parents. His poems have been published by Sparks of Calliope, The Hypertexts, Snakeskin, Ink Sweat & Tears, Autumn Sky Daily, Ekstasis, among others. He secured second position in the Southern Shakespeare Company Sonnet Contest, 2024.

Sharon Kunde is an Assistant Professor at the Maine College of Art and Design. Her research
focuses on the racialization of representations of nature and naturalness in the context of the
emergence of national literary studies. She has published work in publications including Twentieth Century Literature, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Harvard Review, ISLE, and Cincinnati Review, and her chapbook Year of the Sasquatch was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2022.

Faith

She wants to paint two fish
in a sky-blue ocean
under a cornered, risen sun.

Her hand wavers in concentration
over the silkscreen fabric.
Lines smudge, colours run.

She tries another frame, floods it
with iris-purple ink
then, uncertain
what will happen, casts
dry salt on wet silk.

Each fallen grain
spawns another fish –

drawn by osmosis,
by each slow thirst.

Helen Evans runs two poetry projects: ‘Inner Room’, and ‘Poems for the path ahead’. Her poems feature in Mariscat Sampler One (Mariscat Press 2024) while her debut pamphlet, Only by Flying (HappenStance Press 2015), was shortlisted for the Callum Macdonald Memorial Award. She holds an MLitt (Distinction) in creative writing from the University of St Andrews. Places her work has appeared include The Rialto, The North, Magma, and Amethyst Review as well as in anthologies, including Coming and Going: Poems for Journeys (HappenStance Press, 2019) and Thin Places & Sacred Spaces (Amethyst Press, 2024).

Walking in Silence

When you walk in silence you can count your steps and estimate 
how much nearer or further from God you are, and from The Beginning. 
Once I was told that God is counting too, but all these footsteps are echoing 
round his head like a migraine, and that God does not like being The End.

When you walk in silence you can count the footsteps of people 
walking with you. Everyone is counting everyone’s footsteps and we 
are all walking in the same direction but not all of them are walking 
towards God, who just happens to be standing in the way.

When you walk in silence you can count the footsteps of God, 
walking beside you, and they have a heavy silent echo 
that catches the heart and the throat like the smell of burning tyres. 

And the silence gives you time to notice 
that His footsteps are much slower than yours.
And The End and The Beginning are much closer to Him than they are to you.

Edward Alport is a retired teacher and proud Essex Boy. He occupies his time as a poet, gardener and writer for children. He has had poetry, articles and stories published in various webzines and magazines and performed on BBC Radio and Edinburgh Fringe. He sometimes posts snarky micropoems on Twitter as @cross_mouse.

Five-Year-Old Eyes

cue Mozart’s Requiem Aeternam

One of my trips headed home
from New York’s southern tier
to Erie, then on to Cleveland.
From a funeral. Both times.

segue to Dies Irae
	( dee-us eer-i )

The second one, in a blizzard
that had me hoping I’d live
to see Lake Erie on the horizon,
hit too close to home.

transition… Lux Aeterna

But this was the first one,
my first time on those country
back-roads in nearly sixty years.
Driving through Great Valley,
I had to pull on to the shoulder.
I’d been there before.

now Hostias

With five-year-old eyes, I knew
it was the place. I could see it.
An old wood-frame house, just
off the road, hugging the creek bank
behind it like it wanted to fall in
as my little eyes peered over the window
ledge into the water below after
sleeping on the floor among family
I'd never meet again, that part
of my father’s life left behind.

and Lacrimosa

Except, it wasn’t there. All
that remained was a memory
that woke on that country road
in a mind that welcomed
any reminder of those times.

fade to closing of
Vesperae Solemnos de Confessore

Ken Gierke is retired and writes primarily in free verse and haiku. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming in print and online in such places as Poetry Breakfast, Ekphrastic Review, Amethyst Review, Silver Birch Press, Trailer Park Quarterly, Rusty Truck, The Gasconade Review, and River Dog Zine. His poetry collections, Glass Awash in 2022 and Heron Spirit in 2024, were published by Spartan Press. His website: https://rivrvlogr.

Sourdough #2

The day begins but doesn’t take form
until life is given to the leaven.

Coffee steeps and the faucet weeps, and
flour and water is fed to the leaven.

I bow, pray my half-hearted confessions;
the counter an altar to worship the leaven.

Hours pass and the leaven remains,
flour and water is fed to the leaven.

My life is loss but the leaven regains,
flour and water is fed to the leaven.

Left overnight to come more alive,
I’m shocked to learn the dough has brethren.

Flipped and folded, kneaded and pinched;
all it needs is itself: the leaven.

Dumped and handled with half-washed hands,
almost ready to send it to heaven.

Placed in the oven and baked into bread.
Finally, in the end, the leaven is dead.

Tomorrow is new, there’s more in the fridge;
everything ends, except for the leaven.



Samuel Louis Spencer is a poet and journalist based in Tampa, Florida. His work has appeared in The Decadent Review, Scapegoat Magazine, Tokyo Poetry Journal, Inlandia, Third Wednesday, Barzakh Magazine, and others. Spencer grew up in Malawi to missionary parents before attending boarding school in Kenya. He earned his MFA from Liberty University and is passionate about traveling and the outdoors. Currently, he writes for The Travel, Curated, Outdoor Master, and Snowboarding Days. In addition to words, Spencer is a fervent tennis player and snowboarder.