Read More: A Brief Interview with Andrea Jurjević
Hands
The woman with specks of ash in her hair
puts out cigarette butts in empty paint cans.
She is angular and her body’s made hard.
In her stone house she listens to the weather.
Sometimes she salt-cures cod, stuffs squid,
and paints in her underwear. One, the image
of a house getting washed away by the sea,
a fallen grey tooth in a frothed mouth.
Two, unleavened bread on sunbaked soil.
Three, outside, on the back of a wooden chair
a pair of wide raven wings mid-flap—
and from one canvas onto another, as if
the tilt of the word depended on it, her hands
transfer the quiet of disconnected things.
Nocturne
So I walk, watch the sky hang above walls,
another night like a vinyl raincoat over the city.
On an empty side street a kabob stand flickers
like a tired lighthouse, but there is no sea,
just pavement, and footsteps unlike the hammer
of waves. A woman hobbles over, asks the night
cook for a smoke—she’s shitfaced and so is he.
Their English sounds shredded and I fall
in love with them. She pulls up her white dress, […]
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Routine
Perhaps across the inner dome
of your damp eyelids stars sail […]
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Andrea Jurjević is a native of Croatia. Her poetry collection Small Crimes won the 2015 Philip Levine Prize (Anhinga Press, 2017). Her poems appear in journals such as Epoch, TriQuarterly, Raleigh Review, The Missouri Review, and her translations of contemporary Croatian poetry in Gulf Coast, Lunch Ticket, and Drunken Boat. She is the recipient of the 2013 Robinson Jeffers Tor Prize, the 2015 RHINO Translation Prize, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in Poetry from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She teaches English at Georgia State University where she graduated from the MFA Program in Creative Writing.
Read More: A Brief Interview with Andrea Jurjević