by Andrea Jurjević
In the prewar and in the postwar we made colors
usually in the school bathroom between classes
a swarm of girls crowding the graffitied walls
some of us entered one of the three narrow stalls
in pairs one pulling jeans down to her knees
her shirt a wrinkled valance over her downy hive
babbling as she eased herself off the thin piss
streaming down the porcelain bowl while the other
cigarette between her lips added to the wall art
don’t pour fucking confidence into me, I’ll drown signed
the lost generation or some such budding latrine poetry
others, by the sink bit waxy tips off colored pencils
and crushed them into the pale stick of chewing gum
torching it into something bright explosive reckless
between teeth the meat-red pigment in the flesh
of the gum blossomed into a striped carnation
a green nib would bust into a spiky horse chestnut
meanwhile our mothers picked stones out of green
coffee beans dyed our clothing electric in soup pots
in those years we had a case of color madness
busied ourselves concealing the blank featherless white
until everything was disco-fresh all was sunny forsythia
foxy foxglove the provocative-purple of sage
lilac blue lilac god, lilac so blue
it’s the one color I still notice mouth still watering
Andrea Jurjević is a poet and translator from Rijeka, Croatia. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Believer, EPOCH, TriQuarterly, Best New Poets, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of Small Crimes, winner of the 2015 Philip Levine Prize, and translator of Mamasafari (Lavender Ink, 2018), a collection of prose poems in Croatian by Olja Savičević. A 2018 Georgia Author of the Year, Andrea lives in Atlanta, Georgia.