Amethyst Review

Study of Falling Water


In the village when the sun 
has passed over my house,
I go to a place where women 
once washed clothes, and listen 
to the sounds of falling water.
The day hot on my skin, 
the stone smooth and worn, 
I imagine them meeting 
with woven baskets 
a hundred years ago.

Water flows through the village 
into a marble basin.
It falls in a heavy irregular stream —
water from the fountain endlessly falling.  
I take in its random pulse until
I am the fountain and the sound,
no longer battling against hard edges,
making my way gracefully, 
around and beyond.

Originally from Atlanta, Georgia, Helen Steenhuis has been living near Aix-en-Provence since 1989 working as an English language teacher. Her poems have appeared in The French Literary Review, Equinox: A Poetry Journal,The Poetry Library: Southbank Centre, London, and Cumberland River Review.

Spring Rain

There will come a day
when this winter rain will change
to spring rain
though you can't imagine it now,
here, where you are living
deep in January. 
There will come a day when the air
will soften
like soil thawing
and your skin will soften, too,
expanding,
the way roots tendril outward
sensing they will find welcome.
And you will tilt your face to the sky
and whisper: oh, here you are!
Here I am.

Jennifer Skogen is the author of the young adult series, The Haunting of Grey Hills, and her work has recently been featured in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and Green Ink Poetry. Jennifer lives near Seattle, Washington, and goes hiking in beautiful places whenever it isn’t raining (and often when it is).

Echolocation


1.
Under a streetlight  
a rabbit splashes 
across a puddle 
surrounded by
melting snow.

2.
Pigeons spring into the sky 
blowing a circle of skittering leaves.

3.
Muffled thuds of rocks
knocked off a cliff 
pause over a lake
to disclose 
the white dots 
of mountain goats.

4.
Grasshoppers crackling above
the wheatgrass and needle and thread
camouflage the slower rattle,
the quieter rattle that is the humming
of the unhidden machine 
that runs everything.

Jeffrey Thompson was raised in Fargo, North Dakota, before it became a watchword for cool, and educated at the University of Iowa and Cornell Law School. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona, where he practices public interest law. His work has appeared or will appear in journals including North Dakota Quarterly, The Main Street Rag, Hole in the Head Review, The Tusculum Review, ONE ART, Maudlin House, Trampoline, Funicular, New World Writing Quarterly, and The Dodge His hobbies include reading, hiking, photography, listening to Leonard Cohen, and doom-scrolling the ruins of Twitter.

Intercession


Pollen becomes 
honey through the 
intercession 
of one bold bee.

My prayers for you
fluttering throne-
ward like the dove
sacrificed, rise
translated and
presentable
only by the breath 
of the Spirit, holy.

My part in this 
miracle is
no greater than 
buzzing among 
blossoms and seeds,
obedient. 

K.L. Johnston is an author, poet, and photographer whose work has appeared in numerous literary magazines, anthologies, and travel journals as well as a photo illustrated book of meditations.  She holds a degree in English and Communications from the University of South Carolina and her wide-ranging interests contribute to her writing and art.  Her work explores the connections of humanity with the physical, spiritual, and liminal places she has stumbled into in her travels and in her own back yard.   She devotes her unscheduled time to writing and satisfying her curiosity about people and this planet. You can find out more by visiting her Facebook page “A Written World”.

From the Spear Side


Today a bumpy veil of clouds
   drifts, as though designed by a child’s
chalk-rubbing, tracing unlevel ground, 
the subtle rawness of some shale-
   turned-slate, flat but foliated.

   How their gas absorbs the light
and fastens it to blue, brocaded
   shimmer, sheen and blaze—not quite
a sun itself but its conveyance!

   What’s embossed but the faults and flaws
we fixate on—one odd misstatement, 
                                                           then
regrets recycled without pause:
remorse for true harm, shame for gauche
   gestures, thinking we’re too grossly
                                                          marred?
That gash, capacious, opens to stars.

Deborah J. Shore has spent most of her life housebound or bedridden with sudden onset severe ME/CFS. This neuroimmune illness has made engagement with and composition of literature costly and, during long seasons, impossible. She has won poetry competitions at the Anglican Theological Review and the Alsop Review. Her most recent or forthcoming publications include THINK, Thimble Lit, Ekstasis, Reformed Journal, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Christian Century, Relief Journal, and the Sejong Cultural Society.

Objects are Farther Away Than They Appear

All day there were tears about to come about to burst or leak or crash through something that sits in my heart a full magenta red vermillion blood crimson water balloon pulsing bouncing soft and consistent. This private gentle thudding of remembering pushing membrane walls. Always I have been this way swimming diving deeper seeing only those lighted sea creatures soundless and electric, thinking I would land somewhere but never stopping.    When you were here there were always moments of relief from my no-reason-for-it sadness.  Moments of forgetting. Bliss and quiet. 

All day I remember I am getting wherever I am going without you. No wonder I didn’t want to start this thing. Getting out of bed alone. Now decades long the filament between us more real than not. Precious metal fishing line transparent silver violet yellow gold citrine sparkling.  The water deep beneath my feet lapping.  Together we knew each rock and its echoing vibrations. In the mountain only we could walk. Paired footsteps in its memory.

Alone the journey gets so dark. Velvet black. Now blind I am feeling less and less afraid. Just curious.  The antennae of my skin leading me with love down inside the mountain. Nestled. Protected in its caves, in the wet sulfur smells. The expanse of water lapping along our rocks. I see these things and say these things. I am an inch away from seventy.  

Release the morning. 

Open to light.

Release the tears of a thousand seas. 

Heal me.

Bonnie Raphael is an artist and writer living in Thousand Oaks, California. She holds a master’s degree in art from California State University, Northridge, and a bachelor’s from Immaculate Heart College, formerly in Hollywood California – now closed, but very much alive in spirit. She is semi-retired from teaching, This is her first published poem. A lifelong Buddhist, she is grateful to Amethyst Review for the opportunity to share her work.

Deborah Confides in God

 
Most blessed of women be Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, most blessed of tent-dwelling women.
            --Judges 5:24

 
Deborah:    I never meant. 
I never planned. Never 
my intention oh Lord 
to love her.
 
God:     For love to be the geese 
flocking, the breeze 
that whispers the tops of the trees, 
the bench on the path, has always been
my intention. 
You break with me 
when you break with love.
 
Deborah:   She is sworn
to another, oh Lord. 
Under the torn and tattered edges or the wide
sweeping waves of the palm, 
I am your judge. The law 
endures.
 
God:    Who bears 
Jonathan’s robe to David? 
Who holds out your open palm? 
Of the steadfast land, the resounding sky,
the great bursts of the star hydrangea, 
mine are the laws.

Deborah Bacharach is the author of two full length poetry collections Shake & Tremor (Grayson Books, 2021) and After I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Collections, 2015). Her poems, book reviews and essays have been published in journals nationally and internationally including Poetry Ireland Review, New Letters, Poet Lore and The Writer’s Chronicle among many others, and she has received a Pushcart prize honorable mention. She is currently a poetry reader for The American Journal of Nursing, SWWIM, and Whale Road Review and a writing instructor, editor, and tutor in Seattle. Find out more about her at DeborahBacharach.com.

Morning Gift

It arrived 
like a drizzle of reprieve
on my desiccated thought.
No longer clamped by
envy or by anger,
I hardly know 
what transpired
in my dreams, wavering images
of a palace ground, steep-tiered
stone fountain gushing water down
to a sprawl of green where I walked.
I’d said no prayers, 
mercy flowed, it found me 
on its generous own.  

Andrea Potos is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry, most recently Her Joy Becomes (Fernwood Press), Marrow of Summer, and Mothershell, both from Kelsay Books.  Andrea’s work appears widely in print and online, most recently in The Sun, Spiritus, Portage Magazine, Poetry East, Potomac Review, Poem, and How to Love the World:  Poems of Gratitude and Hope (Storey Publishing).  She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.  

New Year’s Eve after the Holiday Away


The intermittent bark
of the collie next door,
Alexa playing Dvorak, Mahler.

Her takeout order called in:
Chicken Marsala.
The Chianti open and breathing.

For dessert, the easy chair.
Louise Erdrich’s 
“The Night Watchman”
waits on the end table.

Enter now the thermostat,
dipping from 68 to 60 to 55 to 49.

Enter her furnace ––
1987’s ironman without a pulse ––
her blood pressure, sole heat source.

Enter the emergency technician
just arrived from the heating company.
His clangs in the basement nailing
dollar signs on the cold walls.

Enter Martha, sister of Mary,
approaching from a corner
out of Luke’s gospel,*
apron speckled with flour,
a loaf still in the oven.
Solo cook, dishwasher,
Martha nods, knowing 

this woman lacks the company
of the Divine in the flesh.
Knows this woman
can’t hear Him telling her
none of this will matter.
	    	
*Luke 10:38-42	

Joan Bernard’s poetry has been published in The Main Street Rag, the Aurorean, Connecticut River Review, The North American Review, and others.She lives in Boston, MA and Thompson, CT.