Amethyst Review

Without Holding Anything
Or Doing Anything Or Trying

Not pushing anything away
So that even happiness
Returns to the place
It previously occupied

Which seems to open
A jar full of joy
Dumping it out
So everything
Has that pliable
Feeling of spring
And the scent of flowers

The feeling expands
Like every green thing
Absorbing the light
Turning it into kindness
An exquisite gem
That the day can’t seem to get
Out of its mind

Even night
When it finally comes
Seems to glow green
Finding a place
For another emerald
In the vast storehouse
Of constellations 

Gerry Grubbs has published poems in Haikuniverse, Poet Lore and other magazines. His recent book, Learning A New Way To Listen, has just been released by Dos Madres Press. 

What Shaped Her

Frances in her library
reading a book on Hamada

in the studio
the potter’s wheel
turns and Frances turns
anew

she repairs a broken bowl
 the golden seams
she said
make the repaired
more beautiful than the whole

on the table 
are the flowers she planted
then tended
then cut
and brought indoors
to arrange
                               just so!

her bees gift her honey
which sweetens our world
we ate some the last time we met
while talking about
the poetics of Bashō 
the tea ceremony
and her young brother’s death
long ago
that shaped her

Iljas Baker is a retired university professor born in Scotland and living in Thailand. His debut collection Peace Be Upon Us was published earlier this year by Lote Tree Press, Cambridge UK. He has been published in a number of anthologies, the latest being Kaleidoscope of Stories: Muslim Voices in Contemporary Poetry and has been published in various journals in Asia, the USA and Europe.

Hoping

 
I hope one day
I can feel peace in my bones
like the five buddhas
nestled in my yard, all
wearing beads and holding
flowers plucked from my garden:
an altar just for them
to nurture as they nurture
me when looking
in their eyes.
 
I hope one day
the stars shine on me all day long
and a shooting one
comes out to greet me
on earth so that my
biggest dream comes true
and who really knows what that is
when I’ve already lived
so many lifetimes,
seen so much.
 
There are no longer surprises
or sparks. Is this the
sign of something?
I hope that one day
I will learn what it is.

Diana Raab, MFA, PhD, is a poet, memoirist, blogger, speaker, and award-winning author of thirteen books. Her work has been published and anthologized world-wide. She blogs for Psychology Today, The Wisdom Daily, Thrive Global and is a guest blogger for many others. Her latest book is, An Imaginary Affair: Poems Whispered to Neruda (Finishing Line Press, 2022).  Visit her at: dianaraab.com.

Haibun (untitled)

March winds whimper through pine boughs and prayer flags. At long last, the gilded doors and whitewashed walls of Ghoom monastery. In the courtyard, three boy monks chase one another with fat brooms, their tattered robes flying behind them as they jostle past us. Taking two steps at a time, they climb up the stone stairway that leads to the temple entrance. As they run up the roughhewn stones, my eyes fall on the deep chilblain scars circling their ankles. 

Inside the cavernous shrine, the splendid Buddha—golden body, brocade robes, perfect hands on lap. 

                incense ash
                falling silently
                through eternity 

Sayantani Roy’s writing straddles both India and the U.S., and she calls both places home. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Cold Lake Anthology, Gone Lawn, Heavy Feather Review, Imposter Poetry Journal, Pen to Print, The Hooghly Review, The Seattle Times, and Wordgathering. She dreams of teaching poetry to young children one day. Find her on Instagram @sayan_tani_r. https://www.instagram.com/sayan_tani_r

Motif


When fullness wasn’t warranted in my writ
I sought it in words. 
Never got into the one-upmanship bid: 
My fingerprint is prettier than yours. 
In last night’s outage, 
a glowfly kept me ticking. 
During other eclipses, 
I discovered newer fireflies. 
Theology led to the thoroughfare: 
I soaked in its suggestions.

 

Sanjeev Sethi has authored seven books of poetry. His latest is Wrappings in Bespoke (The Hedgehog Poetry Press, UK, August 2022). He has been published in over thirty countries. His poems have found a home in more than 400 journals, anthologies, and online literary venues. He edited Dreich Planet #1, an anthology for Hybriddreich, Scotland, in December 2022. He is the joint winner of the Full Fat Collection Competition-Deux, organized by Hedgehog Poetry Press, UK. In 2023, he won the first prize in a poetry competition at the prestigious National Defence Academy, Pune. He was recently conferred the 2023 Setu Award for Excellence. He lives in Mumbai, India.

X/ Twitter @sanjeevpoems3 || Instagram sanjeevsethipoems

On the Firth of Clyde

She sat down beside me on the bench
outside the big Texas hospital, both of us
waiting for the valet to bring our cars.
She also seemed in no hurry,
glad to be out in the mild March wind again.

Your perfume smells wonderful, I remarked
impulsively, a luscious aroma drifting my way.

White Linen, she said, turning toward me,
pleased. A gift from my family. They saved up for it.
She grimaced, it’s expensive.

Is that a Scottish accent I hear?

She nodded, eyes sparkling, and as some strangers
will do, she told me her story.
A husband four years buried, a move here
decades ago from Dumbarton, a town
on the Firth of Clyde.
Glasgow’s River Clyde flows
toward the Atlantic and the Irish Sea,
blooms into this estuary five hundred feet deep
surrounded by peninsulas and splotched
with skerries and islands.

Scotland’s freezing, I said. I’ve been there.

She laughed, showing misaligned teeth.
True, but one summer, oh a dozen years ago now,
we returned to celebrate our anniversary
and we danced at night on the banks of the firth.

She hadn’t seemed a white linen lady,
just an ordinary woman with mirthful eyes.
Yet in those few minutes, she offered me
a scene in a life surrounded by love,
that I recall now and then when I most need to.

A sky lumpy with gray clouds, the cold wind snapping,
daughters, brothers, nieces, bonny friends,
the day darkens to purple heather,
the shingled beach crunches under their feet,
they hold each other, the water laps, they dance.

 

Karen McAferty Morris writes about nature and ordinary people. Her poetry, recognized for its “appeal to the senses, the intellect, and the imagination,” has appeared in Persimmon Tree, Sisyphus, The Louisville Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Black Fox Literary Journal, and Lyric Magazine. Her collections Elemental (2018), Confluence (2020), and Significance (2022) are national prize winners. She is lucky enough to live on Perdido Bay in the Florida panhandle.

Memorial Square


You know that church, that birch, that rusted grating.
You recognize the park from years ago.
It’s like the bench and pigeons have been waiting;
tulips are selfless, putting on a show.
As manhole steam eddies across the lawn,
the sunlight crimsoning it says, “Night’s near.”
The fury you were walking off moves on.

This place, an old friend pleading, “Come; sit here.”

Aaron Poochigian earned a PhD in Classics from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. His latest collection of poetry, American Divine, the winner of the Richard Wilbur Award, came out in 2021. He has published numerous books and translations with such presses as Penguin Classics and W.W. Norton. His work has appeared in such publications as Best American Poetry, The Paris Review and POETRY.

The World's Sharpness

Arising from the 24th sonnet of Elizabeth Barrett Browning


          Despite a handstitched receiving blanket
for your arrival   soft   dry & warm
& your mother's strong arms
          despite the appearance of our world   
so round & smooth   you could   only briefly   
be protected from the catch
of serrated things   from the stab of worldlings  
          So come   you pierced 
torn   & riven of soul
          come   you born to trouble  
muddled by sunderings   & you   
so hard pressed
          come to the one who offers rest

D.S. Martin is Poet-in-Residence at McMaster Divinity College, and Series Editor for the Poiema Poetry Series from Cascade Books. He has written five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021), Ampersand (2018), and Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis (2013). He and his wife live in Brampton, Ontario; they have two adult sons.

YAD					

from Consecration of the Alphabet by Leonore Scliar-Cabral
                           Translated from the Portuguese by Alexis Levitin




Extended arm, a hand like a reprieve,
mouth’s roof, a tongue against its cartilage.
Papyrus spreading wide its foliage,
then, one by one, the loss of all its leaves.

An arm of violence raised up in space,
or else a soothing image of a hand
pressed to the earth, a rigid ban
to passage, or an arabesque’s embrace.

Or hands in desperation, offering pleas
for clemency, the same sign being stripped
of frills and all its former fripperies.

A simple stroke. That’s all. A line alone
that serves as mirror to extended lips,
a slash that cuts across unbending stone.

Leonor Scliar-Cabral is Professor Emerita at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil. At the age of 94, she continues to work as a psycholinguist in the field of literacy training. Her poetry has appeared in Brazil in the following collections: Sonnets, Memories of the Sephardim, Of Erotic Senectitude, The Sun Fell on the Guaíba, Consecration of the Alphabet, and José. A good number of poems taken from her collection Consecration of the Alphabet have appeared in literary magazines in the United States, such as Per Contra, Blue Unicorn, Home Planet News, Measure, and Poetica Magazine. A bilingual presentation of that book will be published next yearby Ben Yehuda Press in the United States..

Alexis Levitin: his 48 books in translation include Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm and Eugenio de Andrade’s Forbidden Words, both from New Directions. More recent collections include Salgado Maranhão’s Blood of the Sun and Rosa Alice Branco’s Cattle of the Lord, both from Milkweed Editions. His translations have appeared in well over two hundred literary magazines, including Agni, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, The New York Times, New Letters, Partisan Review and Prairie Schooner. The Last Ruy Lopez: Tales from the Royal Game, a collection of chess-related stories he wrote during the pandemic, has just been released by Russell ]Enterprises. His study W.H. Auden at Work: The Craft of Revision has just been published by Lexington Books. 

Sometimes I Pick at the Past


It’s an insect bite I can’t leave alone,
I won’t bother with the hydrocortisone,
instead digging with my fingernail 
at the edge, working my way around it, 
saying, I won’t pick it all the way off 
this time. I’ll just pick a little bit. 

I never do though.

I end up with the scab picked off, 
dabbing the spot with a tissue
whose white turns red. You tell me,
I already bled for you, my child. 
Why do you do this to yourself?

And you hold your hand over mine, 
pressure clotting my blood and later
healing my wounds.

Nathaniel Lee Hansen is the author of the short-story collection Measuring Time & Other Stories (Wiseblood Books, 2019) and the poetry collection Your Twenty-First Century Prayer Life (Cascade Books, 2018). His website is plainswriter.com. He is on X @plainswriter.