Amethyst Review

Adamant

The stubbornest of adamant can crack
and even shatter. Adamant can melt.
It can be dynamited, laser-cut.
Once wind and water carve a single rut,
a slab of adamant has to dissolve.
No alchemy can ever bring it back
to what it was before an ibex knelt
to drink out of a pool of recent rain
a ledge of adamant collected in
a shallow bowl. Besides, the worlds revolve
for only so long. Then their stars begin
to swallow them, and adamant, like all
the other matter, turns to cloud again
like mist that curls around a garden wall.

Dan Campion‘s poems have appeared previously in Amethyst Review and in Light, Poetry, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. He is the author of Peter De Vries and Surrealism (Bucknell University Press) and coeditor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (Holy Cow! Press). A selection of his poems was issued by the Ice Cube Press in July 2022: https://icecubepress.com/2021/10/01/a-playbill-for-sunset/

Beacons
 
 
God placed a star inside each stone,
inside each waterfall and leaf.
Not for wishing, but knowing,
and not our knowing but his, knowing
that we would want to reach
down to find it, to discover what
it was we saw once shining there.
 
But none of those sparks can be
reached and aren’t meant to be.
They’re beacons to beckon us
to wonder at the source, the start
of all things whether stones or stars,
or leaves or waterfalls—all things
which start and end in him who calls.

Michael T. Young’s third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. His previous collections are The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost and Transcriptions of Daylight. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. His chapbook, Living in the Counterpoint, received the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. His poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared in numerous journals including Pinyon, Talking River Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Vox Populi.

(lingua franca)


I hear ocean, bleached conch to my ear.
tidal swells relate infinity and back.

you hear me among diaphanous seaweed, 
polished sea stones, blue crab husks.

mix of unnamable spines.  you are guardian.
master of brine.  we adopt common language, 

share awe with sunrise glint, or weep 
a glittered cushion.  I will save you 

from a coffee table, or forsaken shelf.
toss you back to riptide, toward 

waning moon ribbon.  forage depths.  
agnostic in vast heaven's surge.

adopt snails.  salt and sand.  
withstand fingers of unproven gods.

Sam Barbee has a new poetry collection, Apertures of Voluptuous Force (2022, Redhawk Publishing).  He has three previous collections, including That Rain We Needed (2016, Press 53), a nominee for the Roanoke-Chowan Award as one of North Carolina’s best poetry collections of 2016.  Also, Uncommon Book of Prayer (2021, Main Street Rag) which chronicles family travels in England. His poems have appeared recently in Poetry South, Salvation South, Dead Mule School of Literature, and Streetlight Magazine, also upcoming in Cave Wall, among others; plus on-line journals Ekphrastic Review, American Diversity Report, Grand Little Things, and Medusa’s Kitchen. 

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.