Amethyst Review

Springtime in Cologne

In florid cloisters: pacing philosophy
Peace rectangular: forged from a labyrinth
Lane-winding city: mushroomed on the slow-flow
Earth-feed river’s: straight breadth
While Great Albert: scenting the breezes
From un-distant country: remembers creatures
Reflects on rocks: finds metaphysics
Treasurer of manuscripts: spurred by cosmic
Feature and colour: gathered to build
Happy recycler: his knowledge cathedral
Gradually rises: like Cologne’s Gothic
He leaves unfinished: crane on the tower
And patient pursuit of: the rounds of prayer

Martin Potter (https://martinpotterpoet.home.blog) is a British-Colombian poet and academic, based in Edinburgh, and his poems have appeared in Acumen, The French Literary Review, Eborakon, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Poetry Village, and other journals as well as in Black Bough anthologies. His pamphlet In the Particular was published in 2017.

Coming Up for Air

The pirate ships
dispersed during the eclipse.
The sharks disappeared
in the dark.
It’s safe now—
as safe as it will be.
Swim up to the surface.
Look around and feel
the air on your face.
Turn off your oxygen tank
and breathe air into your lungs
slowly, but using
all your body’s strength.
Feel your lungs.
Feel your strength.
Then relax, and exhale.
Let the air go.
Now again.
In and out. In and out.
You can do it.
You remember.

Sheila Wellehan’s poetry is featured in On the Seawall, Rust & Moth, Thimble Literary Magazine, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Whale Road Review, and many other publications. She’s an assistant poetry editor for The Night Heron Barks and anassociate editor for Ran Off With the Star Bassoon. Sheila lives in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. You can read her work atwww.sheilawellehan.com .

                        During Vision

			The yellow taxi passes
			slowly.  Its glowing bulk
			suggests an imaginary connection between
			the burning head of
			the passenger’s cigarette and that array of enormous
			ships.  So many still, large vessels
			sleepily secured to the harbor by
			muscular, myriad shadows.  These
			dense layers of darkness
			cannot halt the stream of
			bright circular lights suspended along the
			thoroughfare.  They can be glimpsed, fleetingly,
			through the taxi window.  This observation
			occurs in spite of the fact that the
			quiet, frozen heaviness of the ships, is
			so unlike the threadbare fragility of
			the nearly floating
			vehicle.

			The taxi increases its speed and
			he looks through the window for a
			second time.

Peter Dellolio was born in 1956 in New York City.  Poetry, fiction, short plays, art work, and critical essays published in numerous literary magazines and journals. Poetry collections A Box Of Crazy Toys published 2018 by Xenos Books/Chelsea Editions; Bloodstream Is An Illusion Of Rubies Counting Fireplaces published February 2023 and Roller Coasters Made Of Dream Space published November 2023 by Cyberwit/Rochak Publishing.   

White Bird

Baubles, trinkets, flashing lights,
thumping base from a passing truck

all woofer and no tweeter at distance
where, what, that we are,

dissolve in endless distractions.
Briefly ear or eye

then traces of memory speeding away
into enduring vacancy, we flash

beyond words, the sound and flesh of which
fade in and out.

We are what comes to us, the frames
of a truck’s speakers vibrating

against sounds it cannot hold
anonymous audience members at a ballgame

cheering because everyone else is
jumping, shouting, replaying.

A small white bird no bigger than an impulse
over a bowl of candy

climbs an invisible updraft
vertical, straight as a flagpole

until it breaks through appearing
and vanishes, as if never having been.

Don Brandis lives quietly outside Seattle writing poems.  He has a degree in philosophy and a long fascination with Zen.  Some of his poems have been published by Black Moon Magazine, Amethyst Review, Blue Unicorn, Leaping Clear, and others.  A book of his poems is out  – Paper Birds (Unsolicited Press, 2021).

A Baby Picture



The blond toddler in the picture is going gray
as the Polaroid fades; her poufy dress, powder-blue,
splotching to egg-white. Second, third birthday? 
The playground near my aunt on Canarsie Avenue?

A metal chair on chains—a baby swing,	
mid-century and no doubt outlawed since—
is where I’m displayed, chubby-fisted, glaring
at someone beyond the frame who offers peppermints 

if I smile, probably. My face  
was stylish then—“a rosebud mouth” they said— 
supplanted by a notion of beauty nowadays
of gleaming choppers bigger than your head.

White leather baby shoes (made only in white),
with choking-hazard laces, on my feet—
they once were just “my shoes,” but by some sleight
of hand they’re cartoon clipart, obsolete. 

Look harder... Try to remember late May sun;
the quiet old men on benches, pungent cigar puffs
tinging the air; the scratchy crinoline
under my legs; the feeling of never enough!

of swinging on swings... I keep it on my bureau,
this snapshot, because the ones who kept it on theirs 
passed beyond time. Nearly a lifetime ago.
I’m still bewildered, sometimes. As I stare,	

the child, dwarfed by the blackening cyclone fence
behind her, seems almost to disappear. 
To belong to another time is a death sentence.
Yet I marvel I was there at all. And still here.

Carole Bernstein is the author of poetry collections Buried Alive: A To-Do List and Familiar (both Hanging Loose Press) and And Stepped Away From the Circle (Sow’s Ear Press). Her poems have been published in journals such as Antioch Review, Apiary, Bridges, Chelsea, Hanging Loose, Paterson Literary Review, Poetry, Shenandoah, and Yale Review, and in anthologies including American Poetry: The Next Generation, Moms on Poetry, The Weight of Motherhood, Poetry Ink, and Unsettling America. Work is forthcoming in Keystone: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (Penn State University Press).

Little Bird-Gods


How would we live 
if we knew what 
the power line birds 

       gossip to each other 
       when dusk turns her 
       vague smile into 

a long elegy of night 
& the dead (newborns
of weightlessness) 

       take shadows for strolls 
       through parks & down 
       potholed side streets 

without hiding from us:
the alive! the ones
really lost (to ourselves

       to each other) no 
       matter how many 
       times the world 

(usually a bird) reminds 
us of our inseparability
the delicate circuitry

       that wires each living
       thing to every other 
       living thing all of us 

breathing beating 
loving as one & how 
would we live 

       if we knew & 
       (oh god, little bird) 
       how do we live now?

Ashley Steineger is a holistic psychologist who believes poetry is the language of healing. She is the author of The Poetry Therapy Workbook (2023), and her poetry has appeared in The Night Heron Barks, Apricity Press, The Lumiere Review, and Palette Poetry, among others. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of Net nominee, and currently lives and writes out of Raleigh, NC, where she enjoys forest bathing, collecting tattoos, and untranslatable words.

The Visitor 

She had made her way downstairs,
was feeling for the kettle, 
with unsure fingers,
in an empty kitchen,
when into the garden 
stepped a gracious roe deer.

He moved behind the rose beds,  
lingered by the laburnum, 
paused for a moment
and they met, 
stock still, knowing,
there, where she had waited,
longing, at her window. 

Heart moved first, 
and as she wept, 
he was gone,
calling her to the bracken beds,
and gorse covered hillside
of their love filled youth. 

Originally from the Highlands of Scotland, Jill Munro has lived and worked in Strasbourg, France, for over thirty years. She studied at St Andrews and then Edinburgh University, publishing her thesis on a study in the poetic imagery of the Song of Songs with the Sheffield Academic Press (1995). She wrote extensively in a professional capacity for a funding agency on the frontier of the life sciences, and during this time also translated numerous academic articles from French into English. She has been writing poetry for a number of years, exploring the themes of memory, landscape, loss and displacement.

My Mother’s Yahrzeit

At sundown, I light the candle.
If I miss sundown, 
I light it when I remember.

Now she companions me
through the house
till I go to bed.

When I wake in the night, the candle
still shimmers in shadow,
throws a warm halo in the dark.

In the morning it welcomes me,
as if her presence lingered 
from her night’s wandering.

Later, I’m not looking, 
I’ve forgotten—
the flame goes out.

Last year when it went out, I lit another.
Not traditional, but neither was my mother.
I needed more time. I needed more light.

 

Susan Zimmerman’s chapbook, Nothing is Lost, was published by Caitlin Press in 1980. Her poems have more recently appeared or are forthcoming in literary journals such as Prairie Fire, Gyroscope Review, The Maynard, and SWWIM Every Day. A poem of hers is also included in the new anthology The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy, edited by James Crews.

Breathing

The outside reaches in, breath by breath.
And any other way it can.  
Not that it intends to take over, just—
everything is at least a little porous. 
My mother carries a rock up from the beach
and puts it on the step.  Days later it falls to pieces, revealing 
the small shells of burrowing clams, the coiled tube made by a worm. 
The tide keeps sucking pieces out of the cliff,
rolling them, mouthing them, spitting them out, 
until all that remains is where a fossil was.
The shape it left, or the shape it contained.
Even that ghost rubs and rubs away as it turns 
to salt, the new tide spilling over.
Further out, a cormorant bobs, afloat,
before its next dive. What does it think
in its surface time? Before going under again?
Empty mind, waiting, or some inner joy?
Vast, glittering, dark—	

Kelly Terwilliger lives in Oregon, where she works in public schools as an artist-in-residence and oral storyteller. She has two published collections of poems, Riddle, Fish Hook, Thorn, Key and A Glimpse of Oranges. 

The anchoress


ghost sister // given to prayer
your heart wants out // the body’s cage

the body’s prison // a cell
god’s hive // sets it free

ghost sister // finger to dry in
on goat skin // wet with the spirit

by candlelight // wild swimming
with the spirit // in you

you in the waters // of the spirit
you alive // as the animal air

writhing // after a bell is struck 
steaming // wet with the storm

of first light // raining in your cell
with the silence // ghost sister

with my ghost // and me, sister
listening for thunder // at the wall

Mathew Lyons is based in East London. His poems have appeared in Bad Lilies, The Interpreter’s House, Reliquiae and Under the Radar, among others.