Buffalo Moon
That spring Tuesday after you packed, left your couch on the sidewalk, fog entered
the pulpy, pencil-shaved underbelly, the stained slender frame.
If I had drunk myself to death that night, I would’ve liked you to carry me to your
river, lay our non-rescuable bodies
spread-eagle on its bank, tell me of the future: two people in an abject town, asleep,
the daybreak mimicking their spent bodies, white steam rising from lichen-
covered roofs.
Instead I dream stranded ships, how I drown caught in a mousetrap, how we wear
paper crowns and they burn — your brows, chin and lips raw phosphorous.
Your eyes little black pits.
And I see you like that in the mornings sitting silently in the car beside which I park.
As I walk the streets, you pass by me. When I eat you study my mouth,
when I sleep you tap my shins, wrists, wishbone hips, and I can’t help say, Give me
your hand, touch, see how warm I’m down below.
the pulpy, pencil-shaved underbelly, the stained slender frame.
If I had drunk myself to death that night, I would’ve liked you to carry me to your
river, lay our non-rescuable bodies
spread-eagle on its bank, tell me of the future: two people in an abject town, asleep,
the daybreak mimicking their spent bodies, white steam rising from lichen-
covered roofs.
Instead I dream stranded ships, how I drown caught in a mousetrap, how we wear
paper crowns and they burn — your brows, chin and lips raw phosphorous.
Your eyes little black pits.
And I see you like that in the mornings sitting silently in the car beside which I park.
As I walk the streets, you pass by me. When I eat you study my mouth,
when I sleep you tap my shins, wrists, wishbone hips, and I can’t help say, Give me
your hand, touch, see how warm I’m down below.
Andrea Jurjević, a native of Croatia, is the author of Small Crimes, winner of the 2015 Philip Levine Prize (Anhinga Press, 2016). Her poems appear in journals such as Best New Poets, Epoch, The Missouri Review, and TriQuarterly, and her translations of contemporary Croatian poetry in Drunken Boat, Gulf Coast, and Lunch Ticket. She is the recipient of the 2013 Robinson Jeffers Tor Prize, the 2015 RHINO Translation Prize, Tennessee Williams Scholarship in Poetry from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Fulton County Arts and Culture Fellowship. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Georgia State University.
Chandra Glick is an artist living and working in New York City. She is the Photo Editor at Artforum Magazine and Faculty at the International Center of Photography. Chandra has taught at Rutgers University and lectured at Hunter College, the School of Visual Arts, and Fashion Institute of Technology. Chandra holds an MFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts and earned a BA in visual art from Brown University. Her awards include the Alice Beck-Odette Chairman’s Award from the School of Visual Arts, the Brown University Purchase Prize, a Summer Residency at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, and a Residency and Artist’s Grant at the Vermont Studio Center. Chandra’s work has been exhibited at Black Ball Projects, One River Gallery, the Visual Arts Gallery, and X Initiative.