Amethyst Review

Holding Up No Matter What

I look for a way out as I write, in the midst
of the poem itself, or as I am working hour
after hour online, listening for the fluency 
of each speaker and their content, 21st century
high-tech work requiring a Buddhist’s patience,
and the pure grit of a person not giving up,
breathing deep to stay in the moment, knowing
this is the only way to live in a desert as hot as 
this one, the Sonoran, one of the hottest in the
world, full of oasis palm trees, an old oasis
surrounded by mountains, covered with big sky.
Those who live here know how to hunker down,
take to shade always, learn to navigate safety
in a place of thorns and reptiles, the tiniest lizards.
I learn to live with such danger to stay safe in a world
getting warmer, a world in which we need to live
in the moment with ideas about new connections.
I know I cannot give up no matter how many years
pass me by and how many poems are needed to help me map
out new solutions and find my way to another morning,
poems that I write on my fat white pads, another
month of them, a woman living alone with a little dog
saving zinnia seeds in a plastic jar and drying them
in the window sill, powerful little things, these seeds.
I’m here with my computer loaded with new works,
sentences spoken out loud with answer sheet grids,
scoring per minute, digital keen and true and later, a small
patch of time for love again, an old friend, and 
a walk with my blonde dog under a new moon,
soon a sky full of auroras of light. I am open 
to the possible as if each moment is a lifetime in itself.
This is the only way I know now.  Coaxing myself along,
using less, collecting seeds, planting whatever blooms.

Charlene Langfur is an LGBTQ and green writer, an organic gardener, a Syracuse University Graduate Writing Fellow and her writing has appeared in Poetry East, Room, Weber and most recently in The Healing Muse, Still Points Arts Quarterly and the North Dakota Quarterly.

Tender


I have been all day tending beauty.  
I have been all day pulling weeds.

Over and over 
Sorrel and clover.

Sour sorrel,
yellow, sprightly.       
		
Dark sweet clover, 
Tangled, reaching.     

Over and over, sorrel and clover,
And crimson flags of amurs.

Inch-high forests of amur maples,
Stems, roots, wicked straight.  

I have been all day tending beauty.  
I have been all day pulling weeds.

Over and over 
Sorrel and clover, 

Henbit and plantain,
Bittercress, bindweed,  

Nutsedge and purslane,
Toad flax, chickweed.   

Tender, Tender, this is your duty,  
to be all day tending beauty.     

Rita Moe’s poetry has appeared in Water~Stone, Poet Lore, Amethyst Review, Mad Swirl, and other literary journals. Besides poetry, she enjoys cartooning, knitting, gardening. Now retired from an investment firm, she has two grown sons and lives with her husband in Roseville, MN

Hymn to the Swamp Willows

Show me, Swamp Willow  
the way of winged migration,
the turning and returning 
of the Yellow Crown.

Teach me the way of your welcome,
wise to trust the heron’s eye
will see the way of what they need,
yielding twig to claw, branch to beak, 
abundant life that fears no loss.
The heron harvests only what will grow
and hold the growing.

Teach me the way of their egress, 
quiet and communion now,
of root to ground and ground to root,
giving self the grace seasons soon
will offer up in new excess.
This is not to wait—a stillness here
will hold the growing.

Show me, Swamp Willow,
the way of winged migration,
the turning and returning
of the Yellow Crown.

Christopher McCammon is a writer and teacher living in coastal Virginia. His philosophical work has appeared in The American Philosophical Quarterly, Ethics, and The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. His poetry has recently been published in Blue Collar Review. With friends inside and outside local prisons and jails, he co-organizes the Tidewater Solidarity Bail Fund.

Starlight Sonata

Tonight starlight washes my bare shoulders the way
my grandmother once did as I sat in the bath long ago,
water from the wrung cloth always cooler, tickled

as she sang to me and splashed me and dubbed me 
her shayna madela, her beautiful little girl, and I knew 
that the unruly, prickly, threatening world held
a safe place I could call home—my grandmother’s heart.

I haven’t been in a tub tended by a beloved in years
but here under the great basin of the glittering cosmos,
all possible love showers over me like praise.

Lana Hechtman Ayers makes her home in an Oregon coastal town famous for its barking sea lions. As managing editor at three small presses, she has shepherded over a hundred thirty poetry collections into print. Her work appears in print and online journals such as Comstock Review, The London Reader, and Peregrine. Her most recent book, The Autobiography of Rain, is available from Fernwood Press. Visit her online at LanaAyers.com.

Trappists in Missouri

Peace is more complicated than a retreat
to a monastery, even though

the silence is gray and soothing
like, let’s say, a cool rain. Here
below the oaks with the acorns
popping under my feet, I am still 
listening for the noise I thought
dissipated in the rearview mirror.

At home, I ached for the silence
between the trees, the footpath
down the hill to the river. 
In the forest time moves slowly,
the bells in the abbey, the call
to vespers, the cushion, the candle
at the altar, belly and lungs and heart.
A car churns up the gravel road.

Have I missed something in the city,
an email from a friend, an invitation
to a gathering of poets? How eagerly
I left home only to remember it again
like a stone I can’t let go.

Al Ortolani’s newest collection of poems, The Taco Boat, was recently released by NYQ Books. He is a winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize and has been featured in the Writer’s Almanac and the American Life in Poetry. His most recent publication is a novel, Bull in the Ring, published by Meadow Lark Books. Ortolani is a husband, father, and grandfather, currently entertaining the idea of becoming a hermit. However, his wife prefers the company of the neighborhood feminists, and his dog Stanley refuses to live without Milk-Bone.

Metamorphosis

A Collage Poem

I. Abstract Bejeweled Butterfly

           After a watercolor, a retro background of abstract elements by Love  
           Tano appearing in a Rumi calendar (August 2025)

After rotating my view 180 degrees, a cocoon of paper gives birth to a swallowtail, whose tail has been swallowed by the edges of an easel. Its reticulation and maze of chitinous membranes and veins are replaced with an architecture of steel with layers of rouge, peach, melon and light coral pinks, a repertoire of blue and green shades, trimmed in black, accented with white. This butterfly is flying over a maroon sea, carrying the souls of my brothers, my sisters.


II. Flight of Butterflies Trapped in the Heart

                      A Golden Shovel

           I’ve been short on courage, but I have a heart
           of sunlight, straight from the king’s hand.
                      ~ Rumi 	

I stare into the abstract space of a universe where I’ve been
struggling to make sense of a swallowtail poised on a short
limb of a pawpaw tree hosting its caterpillar, and on courage,
which tomorrow might bring. It has genetic faith, but I have
questions that are not satisfied with rhetoric; I have a heart
of a fool not knowing my destiny in this late season of sunlight,
not like a butterfly powering its wings by the Sun straight from
the creator of all. Yet it is me, not the butterfly, that has the king’s
favor. The butterfly is lifted by the wind, but I am by his hand.


III. A Psalm of Stars that Fly Like Prayers

           After listening to the music of Sufi Roni, “In Search for God”

Like the deer that pants for water, my soul desires thee.
I feel the music, the whisper of you, that small still voice
that haunts this woodwind, this duduk, that moans
for me and in harmony with the ney—an end blown
flute fashioned from a cane—also cries for me. Do you
hear? For I do not have the words that do not grate
the soul. Let strums of the oud, and saz, and setar chase
after the light of stars. Do you hear the beats of my heart?
It is a daf—a frame drum rattling with the soft chime
of attached timbrels, like prayers grasping at beyond
the stars. Change my heart. Let me fly to you, O Lord.

___________________________________________________________________
The epigraph is from a larger poem called “Your laughter turns the world to paradise”
 

John C. Mannone’s Christian-infused work appears in Windhover, Heart of Flesh Literary Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, Poetry South, Artemis, Windward Review, and others. Awarded a Jean Ritchie Fellowship (2017) in Appalachian literature, his five full-length collections include the Weatherford Award-nominated Song of the Mountains (Middle Creek Publishing, 2023) and the Tennessee Book Award 2025 finalist, Sacred Flute (Iris Press, 2024). He’s a retired professor of physics living in East Tennessee.

http://jcmannone.wordpress.com

https://www.facebook.com/jcmannone

I Sit Like Mary Oliver

This book of poetry nestled into my chest. 
Hold there, I tell my thoughts. If Mary did 

then I can. Hold that glossy stone in your 
palm. Let it speak with lilting tongues. Hold 

that barred owl high. Mimic her hoots.
Hold on, I tell my feet. 

This orb grounds me. Frees me to write 
the smallest glimpsed thing if I just keep 

my eyelids propped or -
if I let them droop like this

afternoon light enters and mirrors star ray magic
bouncing off willow leaves 

and off starlings whistling arias
I didn’t know my heart craved.

Does startling beauty not leave you 
breathless? Do your toes not dig into 

warm soil like an earthworm worming its way 
into rich dirt to do its important work? 

See it wind its way between patient sunflower 
seeds and sightless creatures of the night.

Our bewildered witnessing – 
isn’t it wondrous? 

My book of poetry on this lap, not complete. 
But close. A line added here, a faint 

nod there, a sketch of incredulity that I sit
while grass does its fierce growing

trout its gutsy leaping. The planet hurtles 
through wild, wild space at  break-neck speed. 
Yes, we hold on.

Alina Zollfrank dreams trilingually in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize and recently appeared or is forthcoming in SAND, Sierra Nevada Review, Door Is A Jar, Tint, Writers Resist, and Another Chicago Magazine, The MacGuffin, Salt Hill, and Thimble. Alina is a grateful recipient of the 2024 Washington Artist Trust Grant and committed disability advocate.

Kindling 
 
On a blustery, snow-drifting day,
writing is a glowing fireplace.
I toss dry wood to the fire—
an offering—
words to the page,
hoping they illuminate
and ease what aches.

Marso writes poetry shaped by years of living in different cultures and by a practice of paying attention to ordinary life.

Smoke & Mirrors 

In the yard of 404 Sheridan Avenue
Rests shards of glass; they surround the house 
Like the guardians of my past—marking the 
Semblance of a distant childhood
That comes rushing back to me as
I observe billowing, black smoke 
Pour out of my home and the scent 
Of burning chemicals and plastic and 
Wooden frames of a life built around 
Belonging hits my temporal lobe so far 
Back that I am seven and small. 
I am not a mother and pregnant, 
I am not a wife watching her husband 
Take a feeble garden hose to the
Back of the house. 

I am a child repeating, 
The Lord gives and the Lord takes. 
And as I observe the mosaic of 
My mobility, the corners of the map 
My mind has occupied, I find a 
Miraculous light pouring through 
Each shattered glass, glittering 
A promise of a fixed and certain home. 

Danielle Page is a truth-teller, educator, and writer currently hailing from rural Maryland. She strives to live wholeheartedly in her endeavors alongside her husband and daughters. When she’s not scribbling in her Moleskine journal, she’s tackling her To Be Read list, baking banana bread, or serving in camp ministry. She is an editor for the Clayjar Review and has been published in Ekstasis, Heart of Flesh, Vessels of Light, Traces, Solid Food Press, and elsewhere.

The Revelation of Colors

Time was, when everything we learned was new,
Like kindergarten, when our teacher took
Primary colors—yellow, red, and blue—
From pots of paint and beckoned us to look:

Add red to blue—it’s purple, can you see?
Yellow and red make orange—a dawning sun.
Yellow and blue make green—a summer tree.
It seemed creation could be anyone’s.

Like smock-clad little gods we tried it too,
Paintbrushes dripping, waved like wild batons
At paper stuck to walls with Elmer’s Glue.
It was, for five-year-olds, our Renaissance.

Yet some of us would later learn how art
Starts with the one Creator, as we see
What’s given life when colored by three parts,
Lighted by love, shared for eternity.

 

Steven Peterson is the author of the debut collection Walking Trees and Other Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2025). His poems and reviews appear in The Christian Century, Dappled Things, First Things, Light, New Verse Review, The North American Anglican, The Windhover, and other publications. He and his wife live in Chicago.