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Blow Wind, Blow
You sit me down. Make my bed. For me. For you.
For her. The way she swings around. Sways. Bows.
Let’s say: I’ll tell you. Let’s say: You’ll listen.
My dearest!
You congregant!
How should I use you?
I’m sitting right here and murmur.
I am sweet, you are sweet.
It was beautiful. Congregated. Used.
I should have done something to him.
There were many other
things. Things? Many?
It was winter. Hard. Un-
breakable.
There was a woman. A man. Insignifican’
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Dracula Orchid
We didn’t choose each other.
We were locked together.
Watching his ugly face.
He looks back: I see myself.
Who is in which end of the cable
who is that places me at his will?
This isn’t a game between the two of us,
this tug of war.
Someone’s pulling my strings from above:
once he pulls me, next he leaves me.
Smells the blood. Nosing around me.
The heat of the body. Steaming.
Can’t take it anymore. This distillate is too raw to me.
The beast wins out of beauty.
The scale goes off balance.
Two derelict puppets. Deteriorated.
Event in the greenhouse: behold.
The heart’s been stubbed.
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False Thread
Seasons jam up.
Drill through the spring.
Winter, summer start attacking.
The flood makes a run.
Surging again and again
stalls and then throngs ahead.
Under the sea, the land is shaking.
(The unhoped front comes with such commotion.
While the other is dragging a heatwave.)
The shipwrecks of the lips: pilling of syllables.
Slurs and stutters.
Breaks and floods the words with anger.
It hits. Or gets hit by a syllable
culminating above it.
Gives no time to get resentful.
There is its double if it bales out.
None holds a grudge against none.
It hits. Or let others beat it.
The client is the same man.
Hiding in my shadow.
Matters not what I say or do.
There is no love: Spring’s been postponed.
It might be hiding in my shadow.
Snip. I’ll cut you up, you false thread.
(An iceberg broke off in Greenland.
The woods are on fire around Moscow.
The air is poisonous above Moscow.)
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I’m not a city
I’m not a city: I have neither light, nor
window display. I look good.
I feel good. You didn’t
invite me though. How
did I get here?
You’d do anything for me; right?
Let’s do it! An attack.
A simple toy—
wife? I dress, dress, dress
myself.
The dressing remains.
I operate, because I’m operated.
All I can do is operate.
(I don’t mean anything to anyone.)
What is missing then?
Yet both are men separately.
Ongoing magic. Broad topsyturviness.
Slow, merciless.
A new one is coming: almost perfect.
I swallow it.
I swallow him too.
He is too precious to
waste himself such ways.
I’d choose him: if he knew,
that I’d choose him.
But he doesn’t. My dearest is lunatic.
In vain he is full: He is useless
without the Moon, he can’t change,
he won’t change,
the way the steel bullets spin: drifting,
the blue is drifting.
He tolerates violence on himself, I was afraid
he’d pull himself together and
asks for violence.
I watched myself
born anew with indifference:
(if I melt him!)
stubborn, dense, yowls. They worked on him well.
Right now he is in transition.
He is a lake: looking for its shore.
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Lovers
You are free, said the stranger.
Before I arrived there.
Costume. I had a costume on though.
I was curious: what his reaction might be?
He closed his other eyes.
I’ll send an ego instead of you.
Getting softer, I feel it, he feels it too. Hardly moves. He chokes himself inside me.
Now I must live with another dead man.
It’s not even hopeless.
Not vicious.
Serves the absence.
Delivers the unnecessary.
—Kinga Fabó
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Kinga Fabó is a Hungarian poet, linguist, and essayist. She is the author of eight books. Her latest, a bilingual Indonesian-English poetry collection titled Racun (Poison), was published in 2015 in Jakarta, Indonesia. Fabó’s poetry has been included in various international journals and zines, as well as in anthologies. Some of her individual poems have been translated into Persian, Esperanto or Tamil. One of her poems, “The Ears,” has six different Indonesian translations by six different authors. She has also written an essay on Sylvia Plath. In everything she’s done, Fabó has always been between the verges, on the verge, and in the extreme.
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Gabor G. Gyukics is a Hungarian poet and literary translator.
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