"To the Editor Who Asked I Send Poems Without the Word Cunt " is featured in The Southeast Review Vol. 36.2.
To the Editor Who Asked I Send Poems Without the Word Cunt
instead I send you a lily tubular and fuzzy
and a pink piggy bank with tight-folded bills
two palms pressed together a mood ring
a sun-ripened fig a bowl of fresh water
a watertight hull a port a skirt blown back
the blessings of our lady of shipwrecks
a daughter a shadow a chin doubled in joy
the skip and shift of a kite in flight a dirty boot
I send you a cockpit and a pilot dropping bombs
clear to cross runway clittering over the transceiver
just not the monosyllable its sound hairy
needs no editorial trimming or your desk lamp
to hold down the night it isn’t bothered
by your saying the word semen is fine it’s okay baby boy
we all choose how we fill the emptiness inside us
Andrea Jurjević’s first poetry collection, Small Crimes, was chosen by C. G. Hanzlicek as winner of the 2015 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, and her translation of Mamasafari, a collection of prose poems in Croatian by Olja Savičević, is forthcoming from Lavender Ink / Diálogos. Her poems and translations have appeared in literary journals such as EPOCH, TriQuarterly, Best New Poets, the Missouri Review, Gulf Coast, Southern Humanities Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a Robinson Jeffers Tor Prize, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and a Hambidge Fellowship. A native of Croatia, she works as a Lecturer in English at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia.
Photo: Forest McMullin