Amethyst Review

Light in the Tempest

An epithalamion

Like the disciples,
you’ve felt bone-snapping air . . .
plunge from the eastern mountains,
tumbling into the Galilee.
The chop heaves three lengths
more than the height of your body; 
the water’s temperature drops; 
pleadings rise from the alveoli 
in your lungs, distend the back of your throat.
Tests always begin like this:
Cold wind, even colder waves,
your own screams leaving you
in the last rasp of belief.

				               But then 
you listen and watch and yearn and wait. 
You sense something stronger than tides
below sea-level. You raise your head 
peering into the abyss of melancholy
and madness. You let go of trying
to grab the dangling oar
from the back of the boat
as the wind starts to shift, as the lake
turns from squall to blue, as clouds lift,
gradually, your wet body gives way
to the gentle rebuke in His voice
once the light shines through
touching everything you never knew
you could see.

Mark D. Bennion‘s poems have appeared in Christianity & Literature, Dappled Things, Spiritus, U.S. Catholic Magazine, Windhover, and other journals. His most recent book is Beneath the Falls: poems (Resource Publications, 2020). Currently, he teaches writing and literature courses at Brigham Young University-Idaho.

Banging My Head on My Dad


The day my father died I struck my head
hard against the cupboard above my 
laundry tubs that caught my crown as I 
straightened suddenly, though wash days 
had been mishap-free till then.

“Wake up and cheer up!” a paternal voice had 
boomed a second later. . . . Through decades, 
we’d barely spoken. 

The day my father died I sensed his soul 
high above, heading northwest (a line 
from his home to mine and beyond), 
his lightless fundamentalist bellowing 
and bullying having dissolved between
doctors cutting his vagus nerve and his
having found joy in Jesus.

The day my father died I contemplated 
our reconnection the forty miles to his 
farm and there lay a stiff, silent form. 
I didn’t know whether to grieve or 
rejoice, being both sad and glad 

that day I banged my head on my dad.  

A former journalist and book editor, Neall Calvert has had poetry published in books, journals and online in the United States, Canada and abroad, most recently in Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees (Caitlin: 2022), Laugh Lines (Repartee: 2023) and the journal Sea & Cedar (three poems, Summer 2022). A student of trauma recovery and healing, Neall is an associate member of the League of Canadian Poets and writes from the quiet and wildness of northern Vancouver Island, BC, Canada.

Bark Rubbings

Do you have any recollection 
of that pine tree?
Your gaze 
close up to the rough bark
– studying the weeping sap?

Do you remember how it all happened 
on a hot day, long past? 

And can you recall 
how you put your finger 
into the wound?
– Just out of curiosity, 
to test the viscosity of its tears
and smell 
its sharp scent, 
so like disinfectant 
but wild? 

And did you find your fingers 
suddenly glued 
so that your right hand 
turned into a paw 
and you had to walk away 
holding it up like a metaphor, 
wondering
how on earth summer 
could do that to you
and leave you
flexing your claws 
and wanting to climb and climb
to some higher branch
where honey
might be the good blood?

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.

Eastward


Do you remember the fence?
And the tucked jungle 
Spreading its phalanges over 
And under, ample.

It was a wilder country,
Nourished land, neon pharmacy,
A perpetual ampersand
Implying both you and I. 

You sliced into the thicket
Siphoning a sliver of space, endless
Groveling across gravel bent
Eastward. 

Oh, dear epidermis and dirt
Ever rattling with Eden’s seizures
As its tectonics embed with tact
An epitaph. 

Here lie the entangled limbs – 
And here you lie with them
A tree stump without rings
Never here, not quite there. 

Caroline Liberatore is a poet and librarian from Northeast, Ohio. Her writing engages with interminglings of divine brilliance and day-to-day grit. Her poetry has appeared in publications such as Ekstasis Magazine, Solum Press, and Calla Press.

              On the Mat

Jordan Boyd is writer, musician and educator living in Oakland, California.  Jordan released the poetry collection, shadow burn, in 2020.  Jordan released the album, praise by you, in 2023.

Each Day is Written
Song of Forever


The world is full, like this watering can I pour 
slow over matching flower pots at my front door. 

Wash me, says Elijah Blue, cool me, calls Wave Petunia. 

A cobweb is strung from stem to stem 
with orbs of morning dew. Glistening necklace 

in the sun—web with ancient watery worlds 
where I can see myself—thirsty and beautiful.

How like spider’s transient threads we are: 
holding tight, then gone on the slightest breeze. 

And like the dew: we shine as we are consumed.

Lesley-Anne Evans, an Irish-Canadian poet, writes from Feeny Wood, a contemplative woodland retreat in Kelowna, B.C., on the traditional unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan Nation. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Antigonish Review, Letters Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, Contemporary Verse 2, The Catholic Poetry Room, Soul Lit, and other periodicals. Lesley-Anne’s debut poetry collection, Mute Swan, Poems for Maria Queen of the World, was published by The St. Thomas Poetry Series (Toronto) in 2021. 

Late Night Meditation
Dark and light, bad and good, are not different but one and the same.
										- Heraclitus:
The wooden bowl,	
hollow and full 
of golden light
bubbling over with radiant beams
to fill itself to the brim,
where shadows flirt  
and hide their wings 
seeking solace 
in the darkness
beneath the rim
of the wooden bowl.

Peggy Heitmann has published poems and forthcoming in Remington Review, Last Leaves, The Impostor, and Deep Overstock among others. She considers herself both word & visual artist. Peggy lives in Raleigh, NC area with her husband and two cats.

The Spirit, Maybe
August 2022
 
I don’t think God is with us on this bay
in 9B Geriatrics. “It’s quite tough,”
confides a rather workworn HCA
one morning, during obs. And I'm stern stuff,
experienced with hospitals yet tired
of illness sometimes, thirty-plus years in,
arthritic, fractured, but the brain is wired
to cope. I don’t know why. Where to begin?
I do know that I watch the sun descend
each evening, note the purple, red and gold,
and dare to hope I might be on the mend,
the broken bone at least. My joints are old
and well beyond repair, but something’s good –
the spirit, maybe? I’d dance if I could.

Felicity Teague is a poet from Pittville, a suburb of Cheltenham, UK. She has had inflammatory arthritis since she was 12 yet is able to work from home as a copywriter and copyeditor, with her foremost interests including health and social care. Her poetry features regularly in the Spotlight of The HyperTexts; she has also been published by The Mighty, Snakeskin, The Ekphrastic Review, The Dirigible Balloon, Pulsebeat, Lighten Up Online and a local Morris dancing group. In December 2022, she published a small collection of poems, From Pittville to Paradise. Other interests include art, film, and photography.

Amplitude



No greater fox-ness than against the white
sunlit brilliance of ice: fox glowing

silver bronze gold as it glides
in front of us, paw-perfect over

the jagged freeze
stretching far across the lake.

We cannot look away, just like the time
we turned in unison walking in Kyoto,

to find a 500-year-old pine, a giant bonsai
that spun us to it as if we were 

magnetic. That day was sultry, 
but the tree glowed as the fox does today,

their draw a primal kind of light, 
its wavelength so long 

as to be almost sound – fox infrared, 
tree pulsing to a beat inside us.

And both times, you and I adjacent,
thrumming, our brightness augmented.

Lisken Van Pelt Dus teaches languages, writing, and martial arts in western Massachusetts. Her poetry can be found in many journals, including most recently Sand Hills Literary Magazine, Book of Matches, Split Rock Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and the Ekphrastic Review, and in anthologies such as the Crafty Poet Anthology Series, as well as in her book What We’re Made Of (2016). A new chapbook, Letters to my Dead, was released in 2022.

Goleta Butterfly Grove, 2022



Myriad tiger wings warming 
on eucalyptus branches,
now shut, now the sun’s confetti
ascending,
re-starring the starved blue, cracking
chrysalises from every dusty body—
here. All of us—children, sky-kissed,
singing, here. 

Elizabeth Kuelbs writes at the edge of a Los Angeles canyon. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Scientific American, Lily Poetry Review, Rust & Moth, and other publications. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her chapbooks include Little Victory and How to Clean Your Eyes. Visit her online at https://elizabethkuelbs.com/.