The Missouri Review, grundades 1978 och är en av de mest ansedda litterära tidskrifterna i USA. Den är baserad vid University of Missouri och publicerar fyra nummer varje år. Varje utgåva innehåller cirka fem nya berättelser, dikter av tre olika författare och två essäer, som alla väljs från spontana bidrag som skickas från författare över hela världen. Verk från nya framväxande skribenter och författare som är mitt i karriären som har publicerats i The Missouri Review har sedan regelbundet förekommit i Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, Best American Travel Writing, Best American Poetry, The O. Henry Prize Anthology, and The Pushcart Prize. Källa: tidskriftens webbplats
**
Elemental (third part), by Bill Brown
(from Elemental. Denver, CO : 3 : A Taos Press, 2014.)
III.
River, how rain pocks your moving surface--
little rings swirling just enough to confuse
the clouds, as tall reeds at your bank form
green sleeves. And how polished rocks
beneath the shallow shoals sing for you.
My wife cracked the windows and your
breeze-song entered sleep like camphor,
as if night held seashells to our ears. You
are blind to what my eyes gather from your
surface, and yet I use the second person
as if you understood my syllabic babble.
But you speak a language old as stone.
I sit on your bank and glimpse the everlasting,
as a moon rises red through dark limbs,
turns yellow, and brightens every eddy
and current swirl--a moon you can draw
water from, its lunar drift in every pail.
***
Song On Reaching Seventy (first part), by John Hall Wheelock (1886-1978)
(first published 1957)
Shall not a man sing as the night comes on?
He would be braver than that bird
Which shrieks for terror and is gone
Into the gathering dark, and he has heard
Often, at evening’s hush,
Upon some towering sunset bough
A belated thrush
Lift up his heart against the menacing night,
Till silence covered all. Oh, now
Before the coming of a greater night
How bitterly sweet and dear
All things have grown! How shall we bear the brunt,
The fury and joy of every sound and sight,
Now almost cruelly fierce with all delight:
The clouds of dawn that blunt
The spearhead of the sun; the clouds that stand,
Raging with light, around his burial;
The rain-pocked pool
At the wood’s edge; a bat’s skittering flight
Over the sunset-colored land;
Or, heard toward morning, the cock pheasant’s call!
Oh, every sight and sound
Has meaning now! Now, also, love has laid
Upon us her old chains of tenderness
So that to think of the beloved one,
Love is so great, is to be half afraid –
It is like looking at the sun,
That blinds the eye with truth.
Yet longing remains unstilled,
Age will look into the face of youth
With longing, over a gulf not to be crossed.
Oh, joy that is almost pain, pain that is joy,
Unimaginable to the younger man or boy –
Nothing is quite fulfilled,
Nothing is lost;
But all is multiplied till the heart almost
Aches with its burden: there and here
Become as one, the present and the past;
The dead, who were content to lie
Far from us, have consented to draw near –
We are thronged with memories,
Move amid two societies,
And learn at last
The dead are the only ones who never die.
***
The red barberry, by Charlie Bondhus (f. 1981)
(form All the heat we could carry : poems. Charlotte, North Carolina : Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2013.)
When you left me, I was tending
the red barberries
which bordered
the neighbor’s property
in an uneven row, like my two
bodies, the future one having
found ways to occupy roughly
the same space as my present,
so when you looked
at me, I was blurry,
flickering, a double
image, something resembling
a man, but
hybrid. This was further complicated
by my semi-transparency—
something to do with future
and present selves occurring
in the same temporality—
so it became difficult to tell
me from me from barberry,
my three-and-a-half legs red
and sharp, my belly a burning
bush, my hips like sticks. You said
you could never love
a half-man and I said you
could never deal with red barberry
because it attracts ticks
and increases soil acidity
and has been identified
by the Council on Plant Hybridity
as an evasive species.
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