Amethyst Review

Kelp

Fog creeps in from the sea. 
Seven pelicans sail overhead; 
silhouettes in the mist.
I find a stone with a keyhole.
 
The beach is littered with kelp.
Translucent blades, criss-crossed with ridges.
Firm airbladders. The holdfast grips
a rock with many fingers.

The kelp whispers questions:
What lifts you up? What do you cling to?
How do you find balance
between holding on and floating away?
 

Agnes Vojta grew up in Germany and now lives in Rolla, Missouri where she teaches physics at Missouri S&T and hikes the Ozarks. She is the author of Porous Land, The Eden of Perhaps, and A Coracle for Dreams (Spartan Press) and of a chapter in Wild Muse: Ozarks Nature Poetry (Cornerpost Press, 2022.) Her poems have appeared in a variety of magazines; you can read some of them on her website agnesvojta.com.

Reciprocity 

Pollen is dripping steadily like rain  
under the white crepe myrtle –  
sweetness falling off bees  
that swarm the blossoms: bundles of lace  
forming at the end of branches.  
Opening its veins, the tree is offering  
a feast. Tipsy on pollen, bees are spreading  
their wealth among the flowers.  
Arbutus, green guardians,  
forming a wall along the garden’s edge:  
privacy for the spider’s web  
between two branches  
growing to the sky.  
Fragrances spinning through the air,  
seduce the hummingbird,  
cause mockingbirds to sing with gusto  
from atop cypress trees  
while sparrows are building a nest  
next to the downspout that feeds olive shrubs.  
Along the walkway, paddle plants are blushing  
under the sun’s attention, while  
manzanita stretches over the ground:  
a covering for the neighbor’s cat to tread  
when night falls. A low hum is settling  
over the garden as sap moves  
through branches and leaves,  
as blood courses through veins –  
bringing life to cells that allow  
eyes to see leaves forming on the azalea,  
feed lungs inhaling the sweetness of pollen  
before it becomes honey on my tongue. 

Margaret Anne Kean received her BA in British/American Literature from Scripps College and her MFA from Antioch University/Los Angeles. Her chapbook collection, Cleaving the Clouds, was published by Kelsay Books in 2023. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and her work has appeared in various journals including Eunoia Review, San Antonio Review, EcoTheoReview, and Tupelo Quarterly.   

Hungry Ghost


I watch a mass of red-winged black birds
in the high distance flock against the turning
leaves, watch them rise, tar wings cutting
the sky, cresting the hazy red dusted tree tops 
surfacing beneath them. The sadness inside
me sears blue, & I feed it my skin, my bones;
still it begs, batting at my tendons like a cat.
On the edge of deliverance, the fondness
of solitude, the sadness curls up, purring
in my chest. I think about the way it presses to
my forehead like a kiss, chewing into my skull,
burning my breath. They tell me to count to ten,
name five things I can see, four I can hear,
to breathe in a box, but still I slip into collapse—
a ghost born naked, scraps of flesh, snippets
of voice, face of my fear, hostage of my bones.
I’m trying to make sense of what came before,
before they rose, lifted their razor-sharp wings,
& I call out across a cloudscape torn with black
gales never having fully understood the bounty
of birds, forgiveness of sins, wipe my brow 
of the wet, muted, worn, warm hunger calling 
my body home to rooms more haunted than me, 
knowing now better than to betray the spirit, 
for it speaks the language of God.

Ariana D. Den Bleyker is a Pittsburgh native currently residing in New York’s Hudson Valley where she is a wife and mother of two. When she’s not writing, she’s spending time with her family and every once in a while sleeps. She is the author of four collections and twenty-one chapbooks, among others. She is founder and publisher of ELJ Editions, Ltd., a 501(c)3 literary nonprofit. She hopes you’ll fall in love with her words. 

Four Songs of Devotion
after Mirabai

1. 
Love has tinctured the soles of my feet
the hue of the One Who Springs From Tongues.
When I sang the range of notes in the mountains,
it was only scales and arpeggios.
Hearing Her tonic, I toss as melody in the wind.
Let those whose Beloved is mute clamor at doors.
Mine hums in the smallest cells, as stars within eyes.

2.
If we could reach Her through a diet of krill,
I would have asked to be born a blue whale in this life.
If we could reach Her through the statuesque hunt
for a lizard among the bird of paradise plant, then surely
the saints would have been egrets when they descended.
If reading oak with our hands could show us the way,
I would have transcribed the ravines of its bark
in both rainfall and drought. Only tears and sweat
fallen into the well of peace will bring you to Her.

3. 
With the heel of Her palm
She presses into me
mango that I am
to feel if ripe
then cuts to my pit
undresses my peel
holds me to Her mouth like an ocarina
and plays

4. 
I smoldered
and at last have burst
as trapped sap
freed from firewood
o brief ember
dispelled into sky

 

Bradley Samore has worked as an editor, writing consultant, English teacher, creative writing teacher, basketball coach, and family support facilitator. His writing has appeared in The Florida Review, Carve, The Dewdrop, and other publications. He is a winner of the Creative Writing Ink Poetry Prize. Website: www.BradleySamore.com

Prayer to Earth - Simon MacCulloch

For those who sleep beneath their stones:
Grip tight, hold deep their naked bones.

For those who live and toil above:
Turn still, forgive our lack of love.

For those not yet but soon to be:
Annul our debt and leave them free.

And when this race of pests is gone
Wipe clean your face and carry on.

Simon MacCulloch lives in London. His poems live in Reach Poetry, The Dawntreader, Spectral Realms, Aphelion, Black Petals, Grim and Gilded, Ekstasis, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, Ephemeral Elegies, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Emberr, View from Atlantis, Altered Reality, The Sirens Call, The Chamber Magazine, I Become the Beast, Lovecraftiana, Awen and elsewhere.

Abbey Gardener

I see you from a distance, 
a figure from another age,
under a sweltering sky.

I weigh up your watering cans, 
your coat of loden green, 
your waistcoat, double-breasted, every button different, 
straw hat wide-brimmed, shadowing your face.

Why place yourself so picturesquely here? 
I approve your presence, you perfect 
a perfect view, foreground to abbey walls, 
their slabs of shadow dark on flawless lawns. 

A travelling gardener you say you are.
You’ll spend a few months here, and then move on.
You used to play the tuba in an orchestra. 
You no longer have a wife. 

Turned vagabond, your old life 
grown too small or worn too thin, 
are you searching for a new persona,
embodying a pastoral ideal? 

Or perhaps an honest journeyman, your waistcoat 
marks your status, craft and task?
Or is the Benedictine cross pinned to your hat 
a sign of pilgrimage, your search for grace?

The darkened patch you watered is full 
of the sweetness of geraniums and roses, 
and the smell of wet earth. 

Pam Stocker has facilitated local poetry and writing groups for many years, performs at open mikes and leads creative retreats. She loves collaboration and community, and gets pleasure from facilitating the writing of others, whether they consider themselves creative or not. She worked as an English teacher and retrained as a Gestalt counsellor. Now she has more time, she is writing and arting, sailing, cycling, walking and doing ballet. Faith, for her in a Christian tradition, brings with it the potential for growth and depth, making way always for both ambiguity and trust.

In a Green Veil Folded

Hollowed by the smallest loss
in a forest upturned by hooves,

borrowed shine will blink
beeswax light into your body.

This is how it happens—
a votive that doesn’t know

it’s a prayer will ache
its way into your throat.

Where fawns hide, your eyes
will blossom. Your bones will branch.

You will be sweet sponge moss,
the click of silver beetles.

Ellen Devlin is the author of chapbooks Rita and Heavenly Bodies at the MET, both published by Cervena Barva Press. Her recent journal publications include: Beyond Words, 2023, Muleskinner Journal, 2023, Rock Paper, Poem, 2023, Westchester Review, 2023  She lives in Irvington, New York

Fossanova

It was a room where someone important
died. A narrow staircase spiraling up,
a massive wooden door,
plaster walls with a faded Latin motto,
irregular glass panes flung open
to the sound of quiet summer heat.

Quiet. Quiet enough to think,
to think forward to a future in which
this room seems suddenly,
microscopically, significant
of all the quiet summer evenings,
the silences together that breathe deeper
than all the chatter of breathless relationship.

If death is such a silence, then I am not afraid 
of missing the point,
of missing you, of missing
the careful paragraph of light 
that falls through the open window
upon the room's rough floorboards, careful
not to make them creak, to break
the quietness of this monastic peace.

Grace Centanni lives and writes in Northern Michigan. She has been published in the Tower Light, The St Anne’s Review, and Ekstasis.

laying down the record 

memory of oak, birch and hazel 
sometime discovered 

lay hand on me 
keep me from the bony moon 

I cross one side to the other
come I to the wall with the doles

the saint in my wake
the crouched beast under my arm

a boat breaks its moorings
when I come to fallow land 

what trails  are exposed
at your coming hither 

one for the snipe uncorked from the gorse
one for the earths crisp coat

Lydia Harris has made her home in the Orkney island of Westray. Her second full collection, Henrietta’s Library of the Whole Wide World was published by Blue Diode in March.