Amethyst Review

Rim of Morning

If all the books
of my life returned as trees,
an oak grove, say,

and treading beneath,
I looked up and saw their boughs
gone clear, revealing
the water within;

if all around gushed sunward from my life
myriad fountains --

I think of someone I used to know
who translated Homer, died,
then came back as a clump of snowdrops.

Beneath him lay nothing but grayish ochre
dead oak leaves.  Above him, bare shrubs
veining the sky.  

“Ithaca at last,”
he laughed.


			***

Earth revolves, mists
whiten with dawn,
and the living rise to work, 
each fighting for life, 

and it’s strange.   Nobody asked us, did they?
We are simply here,
friends,
on the clear rim of morning.


			***

Now, about those dirt clots that won’t shake loose
from root-hairs – sing of them

as islands, caught 
in a net of pale dawn, 

while dead roots pattering down through soil
possess the ground

like those footsteps
that made Orpheus look behind him.

For without song,
friends,

it’s the death no one knows
and the birth no one remembers
fast in each other’s jaws --

without song.

S. Muir is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship 
in poetry; the Bernard F. Connors prize from The Paris Review; and four 
Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence fellowships in fiction, 
nonfiction and poetry.  Her poetry has appeared in Virginia Quarterly 
Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, Stand, The Yale Review, 
Harvard Review, and other journals.  Her chapbook, Heredity and Other 
Inventions, was the winner of the C&R Press Winter Soup Bowl prize, and 
her first poetry collection, During Ceasefire, was published by Harper 
& Row.  She is the author of five books of poetry and prose.  She 
teaches creative writing at Bowling Green State University.

Parallel Light

Almost all of the light 
that makes life as we know it

possible     comes from
a single body 

far distant from us
in the depths of space

although the path light takes
and the quality of light

that we perceive 
varies throughout the year

the cool gray of November
being very different from

the intensity of July
when we abandon the outdoors

roll ourselves into shadows
any darkness we can find

and there we are locked out
of the abstraction of pure shape

or pure energy
transformations that vary

depending on the speed of light
waves of energy appearing

indistinguishable 
from the mass of it all

parallel lines that curve 
into infinity     where desire

is abandoned by the purity of physics
trapped in a world of signs

of wires that cross
as they determine a borderline 

a solar system once misplaced
in the corner of a darkened room

all of this seeded by repetitions 
of creation     and collapse

unbounded by any concept of time
that we are able to comprehend.

Paul Ilechko is a British American poet and occasional songwriter who lives with his partner in Lambertville, NJ. His work has appeared in many journals, including The Bennington Review, The Night Heron Barks, Southword, Permafrost, and Pirene’s Fountain. His first book is scheduled for 2025 publication by Gnashing Teeth Publishing.  

By the Southeast Window 


engines hum along Benedict Road 
and one by one i stow my ears 
with flowers. 

beyond the quake of tarmac, 
partitions of stone, tucked inside 
a memory built for strangers,

i count each ghost, pretend i know 
the middle path towards waking—  
to rearrange my roots and dig 

a hole through my essentials;
to carve off spindly threads
or lose my meaning. 

here i imitate simplicity and 
ease to embrace change, hopeful
for a shift in nature’s mercy.

now evenings come and go 
without a word.

                           there is no space
left for excess in a day that pleads 

for presence;  acceptance blooms 
when time is gifted to the shadows.

so i grow a garden in the corner 
by the southeast window, 
curtains drawn till morning, 

as i feel my life unfold 
between the margins.

Lydia Falls resides in the woods of New York after living abroad in South Korea and Taiwan. Her poetry collection, Beneath the Heavy, was published under Merigold Independent (2021). Lydia’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Connecticut River Review, Midway Journal, Washington Square Review, Here: a poetry journal, and elsewhere. www.lydiafalls.com

The corpse sways slightly in the wind
As dead ambition drop by drop
Slips languid to the bloodied sand
And he who dared to raise his hand
Against his father can’t rescind
His guilt. It had no underprop,
His vanity, It dangles, stopped,
Inert. It has been disciplined.

Thus David howls in agony
And emptiness beyond reprieve,
For traitors still are father’s sons.
The battle’s lost although it’s won,
Yet in his pain a prophecy—
A far-off death that death unweaves—
And deep within his blood he grieves
Some other son, some other tree.



Jeffrey Essmann is an essayist and poet living in New York. His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals, among them Dappled Things, the St. Austin Review, Ekstasis Magazine, Amethyst Review, The Society of Classical Poets, Modern Reformation, and various venues of the Benedictine monastery with which he is an oblate. He was the 2nd Place winner in the Catholic Literary Arts 2022 Assumption of Mary poetry contest and 1st Place winner in its Advent: Mary Mother of Hope contest later that year. He is editor of the Catholic Poetry Room page on the Integrated Catholic Life website.

The Mind At Rest

Believe what you want to believe 
but don't just make it up. There are 
enough stories in the world, what 
we need now is time for narrative 
wounds to heal and poetry to re-
assert itself. When language has 
recuperated, the mind is rested, 
close friends have said goodbye, 
you will find a way to produce 
your own scriptures. Young men 
will see visions and watch them
turn into dreams then forget them 
altogether. Because you believe
something does not make it true.

Rupert M 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)

From the Upanishads

“Lead me from the unreal to the real.”
The web of dream and waking fills my mind
as daylight fills a glass. My weary path
does not fork but leads back to where I’m from.
A lamp, a chair, a window – now my old
familiar room is speaking. It is not
speaking English. In the woods outside,
behold the trees I climbed. How tall they were!

As the mountaineer reaches the summit,
the mountain disappears from under him.
The stopped clock tells the time; the blue
ocean parts neatly, like a loaf of bread.
This is not the journey never made;
this is not the futility of achievement.
This is the painted crab scuttling off the wall,
the long years unwinding and the glory they reveal.

To know the light, we learn to know the dark.
To smile, we learn the many ways to weep.
We hear the nightingale to hear the lark,
and only wake when we have been asleep.

John Claiborne Isbell is a writer and now-retired professor currently living in Paris with his wife Margarita. Their son Aibek lives in California with his wife Stephanie. John’s first book of poetry was Allegro (2018); he also publishes literary criticism, for instance An Outline of Romanticism in the West (2022) and Destins de femmes: Thirty French Writers, 1750-1850 (2023), both available free online. John spent thirty-five years playing Ultimate Frisbee and finds it difficult not to dive for catches any more.

The Desert Fathers

We have their sayings, strange and wise,
With just enough of sandy grit
To take the soul quite by surprise
(A horse that of a sudden shies…)
At what at first can only seem
A Christian life lived so extreme
One knows not what to make of it.
And yet there is the strange allure
To leaving everything behind
And staking out a place that’s pure,
Uncomplicated, insecure;
A place where all you have to do
Is every day surrender to
A Word you simply can’t define.

Jeffrey Essmann is an essayist and poet living in New York. His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals, among them Dappled Things, Amethyst Review, the St. Austin Review, The Society of Classical Poets, The Road Not Taken, Edge of Faith, Pensive, and various venues of the Benedictine monastery with which he is an oblate. He is editor of the Catholic Poetry Room page on the Integrated Catholic Life website.

Saint Cuthbert's Isle

By day he watches
Gulls swooping overhead, looping and turning,
Twist in impossible intricacies of flight,
Sun touching films of gold on waves’ white tips,
The seals, grey otherness undulating over water,
Their heads a punctuation on a darkened sea,
The eider-sergeants marshalling straight lines
Draw spaces for the writing of the world.
Herons, stark capitals standing on the shore,
And in the margins of his eyes, black oystercatchers
Are tiny illustrations in the book of life.
By night he hears
The seal-song slicing through his ageing bones
As knife cuts paper.
He watches stars
Swirling their silver on a velvet sky
And feels the motion of the world around.
He does not know
Eadfrith will make a book from all these things.
Here he can read the book of all the world
And know all things are one.



Helen Jones was born in Chester, U.K. in 1954. She gained a degree in English, many years ago from University College London and later an M.Ed. from the University of Liverpool. She is now happily retired and spend a lot of her time writing and making a new garden. Her poetry has been published in several journals in the U.K.

The Coaxing

Because I was young and left searching,
a dress never to fit, but to fill its journey,
windblown therapy on hard red roads.

Like an open book, its strangers shifting dust
so that each day may begin simply—
the mare’s smooth head raised to morning,
a ruby on each horizon, worth a child’s devotion.

To pause and play and waste a little light—
in corners of my own blooming,
your body returning an ancestral gift.

Because the horse lowers its head at dusk,
water spreads wide with moonlight.
There is pleasure in the sound of drinking
as some measure of death, stripped of clothes
— or lovers by a river trying not to drown.

I miss how hands comfort through a war,
I miss the depth of snow’s indiscrimination.

Because I am old and left searching,
a foal in June leaves what must be left—
its coat a flaxen vision I had not witnessed,
nor thought of chasing on my way through.

Vikki C. is a British-born, award-nominated writer, poet and musician whose work explores the intersections of ecology, myth, existentialism and the human condition. She is the author of the chapbook The Art of Glass Houses (Alien Buddha Press, 2022) and the full collection Where Sands Run Finest (DarkWinter Press, 2024).

Vikki’s poetry and fiction are internationally published/forthcoming in Stone Circle Review, EcoTheo Review, Psaltery & Lyre, ONE ART Poetry, The Inflectionist Review, Ballast Journal, Dust Poetry Magazine, Ice Floe Press, Black Bough Poetry, DarkWinter Lit, Acropolis Journal, The Belfast Review, The Winged Moon, Sontag Mag, Boats Against The Current, Nightingale & Sparrow, Origami Poems, Jerry Jazz Musician, Lazuli Literary Group and various other venues. 

*To Virginia Woolf. Her boulders and chains, her sojourn into the river Ouse.

What have we to measure
the distance we are
from ocean or albatross? 
The pieces of offshore reef
breaking on barrier islands
a dead white alabaster
adrift of their environment.
Chrysalides of thoughts 
and beliefs and each
dies easily. The truth never
lasting as long as it should
so we follow what? Maps
their lines, their geographies
the sciences, the furrowed fields
we farm, the chasms and crevices
of each mountain, canyon
and valley. Is nature so simple
and complicated in its sophistication?
The hummingbird, the bee, flower
the pupa, so small yet carrying
the weight of the world. So simple
so pure yet how do we avoid 
the bottom of the river Ouse?*
find inner sanctum where we belong? 
if we are not free of all but the ties
that bind us—to the sorrow, the joy
the thrum of opening and closing
and opening and closing
and opening.

Skinner Matthews is a poet living and writing in Bluffton SC. He writes for spiritual enlightenment of, and with an informed knowledge of the working class. He hopes his poetry brings light to the many dark places that exist like landmines in the streets, neighborhoods, and family households of the working class. His work is published or forthcoming in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Livina Press, Ekstasis, As Surely as the Sun, Rising Phoenix Review, Stray Branch Literary Journal, and Sea Change Anthology [8^th Edition]