Amethyst Review

Journeying Onward

Climbing stone steps to the chapel, I stumble,
Bruising my palms as I try to break my
Fall and fail.
Gingerly, I get to my feet, knees and ego bleeding.
Embarrassed, I look about for witnesses to
My clumsiness, but find
 I am alone.

Then, suddenly, I laugh aloud at the perfection of 
Metaphor. 
Walking upwards, seeking Enlightenment, how often I
Stumble, fall, writhe in my contrived concern for 
What others might think, then,
Tentatively rise and journey onward in solitude,
Toward the Divine.

		 

Deborah Sage lives in Louisville, Kentucky. She has been published in Eternal Haunted Summer, Fairy Tale Magazine, Literary LEO, the 2022 Dwarf Stars Anthology, All Shall Be Well: new poetry for Julian of Norwich, Eye to the Telescope, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, and Ephemeral Elegies among others. She was the poetry judge for the 2025 Fairy Tale Magazine Prose and Poetry Contest.

          Banned Substance


Where does God hide the cache
   Of love and mercy?
Does he stash it under a bushel basket,
   Or is it buried deep
In our fleshy soil?
   The earth is a deathly blanket,
That warms us in preparation
   For the devil’s glance.  He 
Doesn’t hide but puts all his
   Purloined cards on the table.
He is shrewd, catches us
   Flat-footed while we are
In the stand-by line for that 
   Banned substance---grace.  
Perhaps, if we had a metal detector,
   We would find this treasure.

Wayne Bornholdt is a retired bookseller who specialized in academic works in religious studies and theology. He holds degrees in philosophy and theology. He lives in West Michigan where he works on improving his tennis game and writing.

The Maxwell Chapel near Monreith 

How long has this been a place of faith? 
Even the path up from the roaring shore 
Exudes mystery, and the steps are steep,
up a narrow path that leads to nowhere.

But at the top the ancient sea worn stones, 
their carvings moulded by the wind 
to lumps and blebs, are older even 
than the ruined walls that once was their comfort.

The ruin may be roofless and crumbling 
but one wall, the west wall has been rebuilt, 
sequestered by the Family of hereabouts
to be the east wall of their vault.

Their chapel holds their memories, and their bones.
The ancient faith is kept by ancient stones.

Edward Alport is a retired teacher and proud Essex Boy. He occupies his time as a poet, gardener and writer for children. He has had poetry, articles and stories published in various webzines and magazines and performed on BBC Radio and Edinburgh Fringe. He sometimes posts snarky micropoems on Twitter as @cross_mouse.

Photograph by Jeff Howard

Steady State

Because being here is contingent 
on not having been here, 
a choice, an inflection point:

Each thing takes us to the last,
each imperfect thing 
resonating and
ringing into the infinite
beneath a patchy sky, 
a neglected cavern ceiling, 
a welcoming bower 
of imperfect limbs – 
imperfect things
indistinguishable 
from that perfect thing.
So love each thing. 

And what choice
is there? you may ask.

To deny this heedless beauty, 
regard it with skepticism and
squinting into the gloom,
forgetting that
being here is contingent
on living among
vetches and sea lions 
and rockfall canyons whose
trickles of liquid teem 
with waterbugs 
and paramecia that, 
like us, with us,
found their way here
from the vacuum – 
yet sensing
that this might just
possibly be a good thing,
a thing to carry on, 
this living among
and within.

So pausing, just now, to
mull this proposition,
to let it linger on the tongue:
a thing to carry on, 
this living among
and within.

Just for a moment — 
a breath,
then another.

A breath,
a breath,
and the space 
between.

Jeff Howard lives in the Columbia River valley by way of the Allegheny River valley, the Connecticut River valley, and valleys beyond. His work, which reflects a Buddhist perspective on the continuum of consciousness in an era of ecological-tailspin-amid-ecological-belonging, is forthcoming in The Fourth River and has appeared in The Ecological Citizen, Consilience, The Thinking Republic, and Green Ink.

Pond Life


The lily pads are rimmed with brown
this grim November day.
By month’s end, they’ll disappear

beneath dead oak leaves and tired
straw-colored pine needles.
The leaf-needle stew will sink,

and lily pads will be revealed
once more before winter,
ragged but floating.

Then ice. Snow. Ice. Snow.
Thaw—
Solid ice will turn translucent

then transparent, and we’ll see
the bottom of the pond again.
We’ll see lily pad roots.

A few weeks later, we’ll watch
lily pads pulling themselves up
along umbilical cords

growing from the pond’s bottom.
One morning, lily pads will pop
to the surface.

Frogs will croak so loudly,
we’ll forget that we feared
we wouldn’t make it through winter.

Sheila Wellehan’s poetry is featured in On the Seawall, Psaltery & Lyre, Rust & Moth, Thimble Literary Magazine, Whale Road Review, and many other publications. She’s served as an assistant poetry editor for The Night Heron Barks and as an associate editor for Ran Off With the Star Bassoon. Sheila lives in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.

Jubilee

Speaking upward, ignoring the throttled roar of time
I let the moon blossom across my tongue, bitter effervescence. 
Plainness as virtue, silence as self.
This faith, a recent acquaintance.

The seeds of rage grow stalky and thick as prison bars— 
now sedated and hollow, a bamboo forest.
A double portion of shame
transformed. The prophet’s vision,

like the illogical promise of afternoon light. 
We rattled by the bright keening of new foliage
against skies leaden with thunder.
You were standing on the roof. The cattle
turned their heads. 

I cannot match your purity
But I am adept in the practice of convergence. 
The crunch of gravel, the flocked shadows of starlings
Bursting from the budding unleafed trees— 

Gravity, flight.

Emily Bender-Nelson is an emerging poet and visual artist from the American South, living in The Hague. Her work explores motherhood, neurodivergence, and belonging, and she is particularly interested in the Mennonite psyche. Her day job is in international migration and human rights. Find her daydreaming on instagram @emilynowhere

A Walking Prayer

I’m taking desperate walks like I’m an addict
like I’m a shark - if I stop moving
I’ll sink to the bottom of these unforgiving
seas, currents that resist being charted,
tides hurled by a volatile moon, and always 
the scent of blood in the waters  
 
I’ve lost the trail of the metaphor just like
I’ve lost any sense of destination as I walk
just let the breeze blow over me, let my legs
work, let me move let me breathe let me be
dear God don’t let me dissolve - can I trust
that if I stand still I will not settle
like sediment to the drunken deeps

keep me afloat - be the salt in the sea
the rising tide and the magnetic core
maybe I’m walking to find you and maybe
you are everywhere around me already

Aberdeen Livingstone is pursuing a master’s in theology from Regent College in Vancouver. She has poetry in Ekstasis, Solum Literary Press, and Fare Forward, among others, and recently published her debut poetry collection, Velocity: Zero. She writes regularly for her substack, Awaken Oh Sleeper.

A Wave of Light

I lie back upon 
the moss-soft grass,
close enough to feel 
the steady pulse
of the warm earth beneath.
I stare deep and deep
into the lazuli sky.
From the east,
a wave of light buckles
across the dome of blue,
leaving behind it 
radiating streaks of pink.
Following the wave 
fly clouds of creamy white,
the soothing shade
of mother’s milk.
The clouds begin to roil,
bubbling over to fill the sky.
Their creamy color
brightens to a blinding white,
then undulates between
the two colors.
As the wave of light
ebbs to the west, it casts a shine
on the cream and white,
sprinkling them with sparkling hues 
of pink and blue.
The sky forms an opalescent cabochon,
a heavenly jewel of hope 
placed by God as a promise ring
on this earthen finger 
of the Milky Way.

Cynthia Pitman, author of poetry collections The White Room, Blood Orange, Breathe, and Broken, has been published in Amethyst Review, Spirit Fire Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Third Wednesday (One Sentence Poem Contest finalist), Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art (Pushcart Prize nominee), and other journals, and in Vita Brevis Press anthologies Pain and Renewal, Brought to Sight & Swept Away, Nothing Divine Dies, and What is All This Sweet Work?

At Ch'ing Ch'ung Daoist Temple 
San Francisco, California

we stack oranges on offering plates 
without regard for seismic code.

What's tumbled and fallen
for millennia in China, still falls here:
quiet quake of chrysanthemum petals,
sudden scatter of sandalwood ash,
aftershocked tears of the living		
lighting joss sticks for ancestors
whose photos line the walls.

Easy to see here
how quickly everything we love
goes up in smoke—
our major fault being 
(not the San Andreas)
but our shakiness at remembering 
the fragility of it all,
how each tectonic tick of time
clocking out from under us
is groundbreaking news.

Perhaps this is why
the white-haired grandmother
prays daily to deities who protect the home,
offers tea to many-armed Guan Yin
who holds five-thousand years
of history in place.

Home, temple, shrine,
what she bows to now is change, 
the oldest tradition—
its myriad ups and downs
not at all unlike this city
undulating like a dragon,
good fortune that refuses
to hold still.

Daniel Skach-Mills’s poems have appeared in Sojourners, Soul Forte, The Christian Science Monitor, Sufi (Featured Poet), Braided Way, Open Spaces, and Kosmos Journal. His book, The Hut Beneath the Pine: Tea Poems was a 2012 Oregon Book Award finalist. In 2018, The Beyond Within: The Downtown Dao of Lan Su Chinese Garden was a finalist in The Body, Mind, Spirit Book Awards, and The National Indie Excellence Awards. A former Trappist monk, Daniel lives with his husband in Portland, Oregon, where he served fifteen years as a docent for Lan Su Chinese Garden.