Associate Editor Michael Alessi: Jurjević’s delightful prose poem captures the disorientation of longing—whether for home or wholeness. Here, kaleidoscopically scrambled fragments of the everyday reveal a new, startling landscape, one full of expectancy, playfully surreal imagery, and illuminating moments of recognition.
To hear Jurjević read the poem, click below:
Black Snow
After a year on the wooden barstool, I bought a cushion to sit on. I now comfortably read the calendar. Out the window, the sky shuffles in its heavy overcoat. It’s nearing February. Or June. I drink black coffee and rest my head on the kitchen countertop.
Mornings are full of expectancy. My son sleeps in bedding red like February. In the distance there’s birdsong, rain, purple mice, seasons spinning like laundry in a dryer. Back home across the ocean an olive branch wilts in the iron fretwork of the front door.
I note things worthy of the counter, and the birdsong and the calendar, too, all this planetary longing—but that which will become whole is the stiff counter, the broken arm of the ash tree, the pen in hand that gives itself, goes blunt. That is a cup of coffee. But a morning, a morning longs.
Yesterday I saw a neighbor who looked like me, a small woman in her overgrown front yard, sitting on her heels, looking fondly at the dirt, the small hole she had dug. Above her the sky squeezed two dark snowballs inside its pockets.
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.
