Amethyst Review

Grace


An attendant on the worst flight I’ve ever 
taken—Orlando to Newark, alone, when my 
husband’s father was dying but I had to go

back to work—pointed at my stack of essays to
grade and smiled. I nodded, smiled back. So
she seated an unaccompanied child beside me.

Even the take-off was rough. A flock of gray-
clad nuns sorted through rosary beads across
the aisle, whispering, each window sealed with 

clouds the dun hue of their habits. We rose and 
dropped, rose and dropped. The child—a girl
with an Old Testament coloring book—cheered

every bump. Loudly. I clung to my principal-in-
the-classroom face, sure we were doomed, but
we lurched into New Jersey and thumped down: 

safe at home. At five, I kept flapping my arms
and trying to fly off the front steps, landing with
my toes stinging inside my shoes. So magic was

a bust. Grown, I still have trouble with physics— 
how counter-intuitive the momentum, the bright,
Windex-clear air under jets! My sister says she

doesn’t get nervous unless she can imagine a 
click-bait headline about the disaster about to
envelop her: be sure to count the Boy Scouts in

line before boarding anything. But all of these
are human inventions. Might as well listen to
the creek after a 3 AM rain, after its late night

shenanigans. Today’s sunlight is my late mom
hanging out sheets to dry and the wind is how she
flapped them first. I think that could be grace.

Christine Potter lives in New York’s Hudson River Valley.  Her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Sweet, Mobius, Eclectica, Kestrel, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Fugue, and been featured on ABC Radio News. She has poetry forthcoming in The Midwest Quarterly. Her time-traveling young adult novels, The Bean Books, are published by Evernight Teen.

Parole Denied
 
Eyes throw double daggers,
His mouth a razor slash,
Angled nose a switchblade,
For cutting any fool who stumbles close.
 
He smiles straight teeth,
Genetic chance, not tooth attention.
His wide grin is skeletal,
A rictus of desert-bleached bones.
 
He winks, “Save your pity,”
Sucks his teeth, “Ain’t no big thing.”
My eyes drawn to his I see tears frozen there,
Drops inked in flesh, forever etched.
 
He calls me back to a grotto I know,
An altar in shadow on swells of grass,
Mary, her son draped on her knee
Willing him to smile, to wink “It’s alright.”
 
Her tears, too, are frozen, and written there I read,
“Great as the sea is my sorrow”
Telling me should her tears fall, or his,
The wave of them would wash away the world.
 

David Cameron catches poems half-formed from an off-hand comment or a twist of phrase that makes him see things in a new light. He spent a long time as a Presbyterian pastor and then ended his paying career directing a Meals on Wheels program in western NC. He is now on loan to the trails and waterfalls of the area.

Communion of Saints II

				for my goddaughter, Sylvia

Today I wrote another letter 
           to my goddaughter dying…
                                  who we know now, is dying.

And I think about the theatre curtain,
           wine-like and substantial that cloisters 
                                  us underlings from the players.

I told her if she went before me
           I would pray to her and petition her 
                                  for a stageful of intercessions, 

for seventy times seven
           consecrated props. It will, of course, 
                                  not be that tall crimson pall

but a veil sheer and willowy 
           as wings, perhaps Irish lace
                                  latticed and lustrous,

so that now I feel her breath 
           against my face, her
                                  breath against my face.
                          

Fred Gallagher is Editor-in-Chief at Good Will Publishers, Inc., the parent company of TAN Books and Saint Benedict Press. He is the author of three memorial volumes on bereavement and three children’s books on character development. He has also authored a novel entitled The Light Hiding in Spindle. Fred has published poetry in Agora, Sanskrit, Cold Mountain Review, and is the 2023 winner of the Prime Number Magazine Annual Poetry Award. He resides with his wife, Kim, in Charlotte, N.C.

Homing

Life glides through us like seabirds through a mist
in search of land they’ve never seen before
but know each contour of and can’t resist
the urge that guides them through the corridor
of fog. To them, their island is a dream,
the sort of dream that draws a creature on,
though it may also be a mist. The scheme
is hidden in the flight, a pearl-gray swan.
The flock itself is made of mist, a skein
so vanishingly fine it’s hardly there,
not lilac, but a faint hint of vervain,
whose flower has the scent of empty air.
It leads the migrants, and the pilgrims too,
who take from it which north and south are true.

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/

Don’t Rake the Leaves!

Let them lie on your front lawn.
They enrich the soil.
Butterflies can lay their eggs
on the crusty clusters outside
your window just as birds
feed and rest beneath
the wind-rustled cover
near the chipmunks and toads
sheltering under the same roof
in the woods all through
the rigor of winter.

And when it comes time for me
to leave, I will enter as a plant does,
growing roots into the earth
of the forest and join
the small, wide-eyed creatures
as I nurture them.

Janet Krauss, who has two books of poetry published, Borrowed Scenery, Yuganta Press, and Through the Trees of Autumn, Spartina Press, has recently retired from teaching English at Fairfield University. Her mission is to help and guide Bridgeport’s  young children through her teaching creative writing, leading book clubs and reading to and engaging a kindergarten class. As a poet, she co-directs the poetry program of the Black Rock Art Guild.

Sapphire


I have a treasure in my soul
given to me long ago
in words of bright, 
and literal blue

by a stranger who, 
told me that The Kingdom of God 
was a planet 
made of sapphire 
and that one day 
we would go there.

She said it, sharp and clear as fact,
directing her prophesy 
specifically at me. 

I remember -

though we only met briefly
how my friend pulled me away,
whispering, 
'Let's go.'

And so we turned our backs
and headed for the M3

And we stood thumbs up
hitchhiking for maybe forty years
and forgetting each other
and where we were going.

Everything about those days is hazy

But the sapphire planet still
shines
and I wonder 
if it is not in fact 
a star.

I know nothing about astronomy
but I have felt those azure rays
it seems, for an eternity.

And in my madness have bathed
in their light sometimes, 

wondering

fearful of gullibility
but lured back by beauty

So that I can now say
- sharp and clear as fact -
that something crystalline 
and true
now grows within me
reshaping 
with exquisite ordinances
the lost years
of my rebellion.

Valerie Maria Anthony is a London and Hampshire-based poet who has published In Oremus Magazine and Amethyst Review. She believes poetry can be an instrument of grace and takes joy seriously enough to look for it everywhere. She has many years of experience facilitating creative writing workshops in social care settings and is a trained visual artist.

Joy


              It stalks me, knows
where I am, follows me now,
 
can see me, a wolf at the edge 
              of the pine forest watching as I run

through panes of light,
              against the air that whispers 

through the trees, that wants
              to lift me up like a sail. 

Nothing scares me more
              than being unhinged 

but when a dove lands before me
              I stop short, caught breathless,

breaking open, torn from the trough
              of despair I feel so safe in. No choice

but to rise, and I am stretched out,
              devoured, expanding into the trees, this bird,

no I, only we,  untethered to me 
              and inside of everything

              mortal and earthbound.

Heather Swan‘s poems have appeared in such journals as Terrain, Minding Nature, Poet Lore, Phoebe, The Raleigh Review, Midwestern Gothic and Cold Mountain. She is the author of the poetry collection A Kinship with Ash (Terrapin Books), a finalist for the ASLE Book Award, and the chapbook The Edge of Damage ( Parallel Press), which won the Wisconsin Chapbook Award. Her nonfiction has appeared in Aeon, Belt, Catapult, Edge Effects, Emergence, ISLE, Minding Nature, and  The Learned Pig. Her book Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field (Penn State Press) won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. She teaches environmental literature and writing in Madison at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Missionaries


They sail to places where their congregations
have never seen a map to plant churches
in jungles, deserts, in rainforests, in countries
not easily reached, and sometimes closed.

Watches or clocks are useless in many 
of these places; time is measured in dreams 
or when animals migrate. Ants or water buffalo
can be the timekeepers. Or molting alligators.

To communicate with their new flock
they must learn to make sounds their ears
have never heard or eyes seen. They teach
catechumens to recite God's name 

in different dialects without alphabets.
They sing in harmony with shafts
of sunlight; no high sopranos here;
toucans, hornbills, parrots make up the chorus.

They carry rainbows in their Bibles and build
ambries decorated with plantain leaves and
raise special praying bees for sanctuaries.
They use mists and moss to teach Gospel lessons.

The know God's gathering places and where
to hunker down when storms, earth slides, or
floods try to overcome their will to believe.
They inscribe epitaphs on bamboo tombstones.

Philip Kolin is the Distinguished Professor of English (Emeritus) and Editor Emeritus of the Southern Quarterly at the University of Southern Mississippi. He has published over 40 books, including twelve collections  of poetry and chapbooks. Among his most recent titles are Emmett Till in Different States (Third World Press, 2015), Reaching Forever (Poiema Series, Cascade Books, 2019), Delta Tears (Main Street Rag, 2020), Wholly God’s: Poems (Wind and Water Press, 2021), and Americorona: Poems about the Pandemic (Wipf and Stock, 2021).

Shelter

All day, the rain has been plinking,
plunking, finally pelting down.
The whole time, latched to a slat
on the back of a bench outside
my kitchen window, a praying mantis.
Like a wooden clothespin with electric-green
limbs, not praying but splayed, tiny guy
wires that wrap and cling. Invertebrate
body looking like the offspring
of a pterodactyl tamped into the cast
of a clasped pocketknife. Still as a stick. If this
were me, I would fan my wings and flail
at the wet. Check and re-check the weather
on my phone. At the very least wail
about the lack of a cup of hot tea. But no.
Here’s a slim Zen priest, head bowed beneath
the lip of the rickety seat’s top rail. Just clearing
fat raindrops, poised to plop into the abyss.
Alert, as the sutras teach. At ease.

Paige Gilchrist lives in Asheville, NC, where she writes poetry and teaches yoga. Her poems have appeared in Kakalak, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, and The Great Smokies Review.

Annie Diamond is an Ashkenazi Jewish poet living and working in Chicago. She has been awarded fellowships by MacDowell, Luminarts Cultural Foundation, The Lighthouse Works, and Boston University, where she earned her MFA in 2017. Her poems appear and are forthcoming in No Tokens, Yemassee, Modern Language Studies, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere.