You hold out your hand again for more world.I wish I could commission oneof the great sand painters to tell you about it.To show you in gypsum, or in ochre,in pollen, bone fiber, acacia gum, or lead.Seed syllables, shucked from the cloudsin an ambient blitz. Night after nightI feel like a theocracy shriveling in the heat.Sweep away the ecclesiastical dust in the street(the sweeper starts on one side of the city)& find me where you left me, awakeamong the yellow horses spilling from their side-walk stalls, sidestepping fruit vendorsin an inharmonious derby of sugar & gurgles,bolting headfirst into the backlit riverwhere the onlookers look unquestioninglyfrom their glassless windows, their house built of paint,at the alignments of random points in a plane.
Feature Date
- June 24, 2024
Series
- What Sparks Poetry
Selected By
Share This Poem
Print This Poem
Copyright © 2024 by Gilad Jaffe
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Columbia, Missouri
University of Missouri
Editor
Speer Morgan
Managing Editor
Marc McKee
Associate Editor
Evelyn Somers
Poetry Editor
Jacob Hall
The Missouri Review, founded in 1978, is one of the most highly-regarded literary magazines in the United States and for the past thirty-four years we’ve upheld a reputation for finding and publishing the very best writers first. We are based at the University of Missouri and publish four issues each year. Each issue contains approximately five new stories, three new poetry features, and two essays, all of which is selected from unsolicited submissions sent from writers throughout the world.
New, emerging, and mid-career writers whose work has been published in The Missouri Review have been anthologized over 100 times in Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, Best American Travel Writing, Best American Poetry, The O. Henry Prize Anthology, and The Pushcart Prize. We are also pleased to be the first to have published the fiction of many emerging writers, including Katie Chase, Nathan Hogan, Jennie Lin, Susan Ford, and Elisabeth Fairchild.
“The Missouri Review is, quite simply, one of the best literary journals in the world.”
—Robert Olen Butler
“I’ve admired The Missouri Review for years. . . . It’s one of a half-dozen literary magazines I always read.”
—Joyce Carol Oates
Poetry Daily Depends on You
With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.
