Editor’s note: Poems best viewed in landscape mode.
Learning english
Scrape some dirt outside your rental into a soup bowl and add tap
water to make paste. You’ll need a mold, too—a special effects
silicone tongue, like the one from The Exorcist, will do. Once you
have your paste and mold, every morning upon waking tear the
tongue in your mouth into thin strips. Don’t cut the tongue—torn
strips conform smoother to the mold. Dip one piece at a time into
the paste until it’s saturated. Hold the strip over the bowl and run
it through your fingers squeezing off excess paste. Stick the strip
over the silicone mold and smooth it down firmly with your
fingers. Cover the mold entirely with a layer of saturated strips,
making sure they overlap. After one layer is applied, let it dry
completely. This can take up to 24 years. Once the first layer of
tongue strips is dry, apply a second layer and let that one dry
completely. Repeat this process until you get the desirable shape.
You should have at least three layers. Again, let each layer dry
completely. Once all the layers are applied and dried, you’re ready
to stick your American tongue onto the flagpole by your rented
front door and let it flap, idly flap.
Only River is fluent
At the edge of the city gradom
at the edge of Sunday teče
the river rinses the streets rijeka
clean
dust at home is more mundane prašine
than dust abroad—that shit glimmers
but not as much as dust in a land prašina
that exists in the past povijesti
everything depends on ~ ~ ~
the point of origin je
show me a janitor strana
who isn’t a foreigner čistačica
in this country where Amerikom
my tainted tongue se
twists around your Monday uvijam
makes it handsomely zgodno
trafficky volare oh, oh
my corpus separatum svoja
free-stating around sam
your paper mill na tvom tržištu
Majmun
After Ohara Koson’s Monkey Reaching for the Moon
I say majmun: mī-mōōn. You say monkey.
I say ćutim: choo-tim. The ch rings soft as a cricket’s chirp, as in tune or Tuesday, ćutim, too-tim.
Ćutim: be silent, and in that silence know.
I say kruh and you say bread. What we mean goes extinct like the wild pigeon. Place yours, mine, all
the world’s tongues in a continuum. The totality of them is the mother
moon reflected in the pond. Take a pen and mark the borders where I end and you begin. Draw a
braided loaf. And some breadcrumbs, too.
Each crumb is a cricket’s meal. Čuj, čuj! Hear,
hear the rub of its wings, Be my moon, I’ll be your forever monkey.
Andrea Jurjević is the author of two poetry collections and a chapbook, most recently, In Another Country (Saturnalia Press, 2024). Her book-length translations from Croatian include Mamasafari (Diálogos Press, 2018) by Olja Savičević and Dead Letter Office (The Word Works, 2020) by Marko Pogačar. She is a native of Croatia. Andrea can be found on Twitter and Instagram at @andrea_jurjevic.
Photo by Steve Johnson