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| Photo by Martins Krastins |
Numero III by Attila Balogh
You've left me
to argue with my mother's poverty,
so I'll open the wall of her face
and cajole youth out of her eyes.
I still feel
the mass of red flesh
in my hollow tooth,
because she fed me,
she nicknamed carcasses food
for me to eat,
she hid me from my father's cursing
she covered me with her chubby palm.
You've left
kicking the pebbles of the night,
I kick your breathing footprints,
the rhythm of your distancing footsteps
rolls on my eardrum.
You've left me
to make friends with the cigarette butt I've inherited from my father
to hush the clatter of my crutch.
You are a liar,
you said
you'd give me the throbbing wall of your belly
above the fence of your thighs
because it's like
my mother's panting
when she lost the borrowed money.
You said
we'd built a crown on my head
from diamond
and mud,
because there will be a wedding dance,
you lied,
for my lovers are porn pictures
who came alive in my dreams,
my mother is the witness.
I take a step towards you with my left foot:
I tear your hair out,
I slap both of your faces,
I pluck the nicely combed fringes of your eyes.
I came to demand a home,
a two by two home,
I got up,
I attached the machine to my legs
I had to wash up
I had to wrinkle the water up to my face,
you heartened me,
but poverty is my first cousin,
you couldn't bring down
the pyramids of penury,
you didn't search for the outline
of my bare foot in the dust.
I'm not a poet
I toll in the tongue of the bells,
about fates stuck in hovels
with the impulse of a Nativity play,
below the gates,
an eternal rebel
against poverty.
I have no nice clothes;
I don't go to gatherings
because it's required to dress nicely
there.
I decorate myself inside,
my uniform is beautiful:
I wear human skin.
Attila Balogh's poetry collection The Heart Attacks of the Soul was published by Singing Bone Press.
Attila Balogh is a Gypsy-Hungarian poet, writer and journalist. He has published several volumes of poetry in Hungarian since 1980. A collection of his poetry entitled The Heart Attacks of the Soul was published in English by Singing Bone Press in Michael Castro's and Gabor G. Gyukics's translation.
Michael Castro (1945-2018) was a poet and translator. In 2015 Castro was named the first Poet Laureate of St. Louis. He was a founder of the literary journal River Styx.
Gabor G. Gyukics is a Budapest born Hungarian-American poet, translator, and author of 11 books of poetry in five languages, 1 book of prose and 16 books of translations including A Transparent Lion, selected poetry of Attila József and Swimming in the Ground: Contemporary Hungarian Poetry in English, and an anthology of North American Indigenous poets in Hungarian. He was honoured with the Hungarian Beat Poet Laureate Lifetime award in September 2020 by the National Beat Poetry Foundation, Inc. based in Connecticut. After spending 2 years in Amsterdam, Holland, and 14 years in different cities in America, now he is living in the city of Szeged in Hungary.
HLO HU
