Four Poems by Andrea Jurjević Artwork by Kirstin Mitchell

She Floated Away
After Hüsker Dü

 

A mob of slam dancers hurls and shoves in the mosh pit of the park fountain—all this furor, thrust-riot, all this outage, the ridding

of the white corset. Under the cankered poplar a man rests his stiff leg across his lover’s knees, leans into her narrow shoulder and scratches a rough scratch in the V of her thighs—

the axis of her body, black as the tail of a swallow, forked as a dowsing rod.

Yet her gaze is fixed on the fountain, which today has been leaking.

Her wrist wilts by her breast, her fingers boneless. In her lap rests his twitching arm, which is the arm of Christ, the arm of a man dying,

and she’s a woman who wants just to sit and watch water escape, lift arms and float away.

 

 

Elegy With Golden Oriole 

In my dreams they arrive, eyes large,

blood-shot, filled with inability to budget

emotion, the way I knew them after

love. Carry me, said one whose mother

rattled for air while I kept him in bed.

Woman of my dreams, said another—late

winter, ocean choking on trash—bury me,

and reached into his secondhand coat

to pull out a pack of Winston Gold

and a thin amber ring—a begging

mouth of a songbird my finger

fell into. The dream ends in a blink,

the proposer bows out, folds his body

into a box, like a piece of hotel stationery.

 

Epithalamium

Instead of the wedding, weather took place—

that landless squatter moved into your bones,

built its house in one night. the ocean pulled

back its white, scalloped lace. the thin keels

of ships snapped like broken spines. the seabed

sunk, the sky heaved into it. magpies strutted

a stiff, guard-like swagger. all the bread loafs

lay upside-down. cows wandered in wide circles.

that midnight of our second year, every broken

thing was washed away—a kind of eviction:

the sky, the land, the ocean, and its endless

fitful rocking, falling, roiling, until there was

nothing, not even air, or those thrashing voices

of ours, drowning like a litter of kittens—

 

Star Bar
Atlanta, Georgia

A constellation of beer cans and ashtrays 

glints in dive-discord along the bar top 

as another used-up band sets up on stage 

and you, cernuous and ambering, 

cut through the monochromatic crowd

like mic feedback. The room, tar-bright, 

is a musty bellows, a hissy accordion collapsing 

into its sticky self, the band’s narcotic vamp. 

My back to the jukebox, the golden toilet, 

the bank-vault-turned-Elvis’-junk-shrine, 

my 66th cigarette conducting this nocturne,  

I watch you draw close—the polyrhythmic 

swing of your gait, the spill of your red shirt—  

your washing out, like a starfish at my feet.

 

 

***

 

Andrea Jurjević is the author of Small Crimes, winner of the 2015 Philip Levine Poetry Prize, and a translator whose book-length translations from Croatian include Mamasafari(Diálogos Press/Lavender Ink 2018) and Dead Letter Office (The Word Works, 2020)

 

 

 

Kirstin Mitchell is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Atlanta, Georgia. She is a recent MOCA GA Working Artist Project Fellow and has a studio through the Atlanta Contemporary Studio Artist Program. She has performed with the support of the Franklin Furnace Fund in Manhattan, New York, and her work has been featured in Art in America, Art Papers, and Flash Art magazines. Recent solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta Contemporary, and Hathaway Gallery.  Her collections include Portman Architects, MOCA GA, as well as private collections in the United States and Europe. Visit her website at kirstinmitchell.com.

The artwork published here is from Kirstin Mitchell’s series entitled:

BIG DEEP: Catskills
Performalist self-portrait, 2013