Mona Aicha Masri: I Want to Pray

For our first excerpt from A Bay of Megaphones, the new anthology of young Hungarian poets, we offer a poem by Mona Aicha Masri, whose "fearless love poetry writes itself into the rich Western and Eastern tradition of amor sanctus," writes András Visky. I Want to Pray is translated by Anna Bentley

 17th March, 2023

Mona Aicha Masri’s fearless love poetry writes itself into the rich Western and Eastern tradition of amor sanctus. It does this, however, not as religious ecstasy, but instead as the burning loneliness of unconsummated love, in which the solitariness of the body is heightened and its lonely opening-up becomes an occasion for welcoming the world in. In Masri’s poems, erotica is the way to “emptying inwards,” and the setting free of the tongue a practice which, in this dynamic, “elevates” colloquial language and even slang as well, and makes these the chief material with which we can sense both ourselves and the world.

Physical sensations turn into linguistic surprises and vice versa: the multilingual texts that are born in this stream of consciousness (at this time mainly characteristic of her prose) lay bare deep levels of identity. Slang and hidden Biblical references, textual fragments of Ancient Hebrew and Greek koine: all of these make tangible to the reader a sort of permanent transience, the cracks and fissures that come about on the surface of time. Mona Aicha Masri’s textual inundations are sudden, beautiful, cataclysmic bursts of meaning; they sweep us along relentlessly but gently.

András Visky

 

 

I Want to Pray

 

If you were here, I’d say lie down beside me on the green blanket, the winking of the fairy lights wouldn’t bother us, the scent of cinnamon, we’d look good in the cold glow. You’d ask what’s new, and I’d say this year I learned

 

to be empathetic, forehead-wrinkling, eyebrow-raising, just the inner part of it near the nose, we mustn’t tip over into astonishment.

 

Give it a try, no not like that, look at me. Imagine you want to press your eyeballs
into an oval, two eggs. Relax your lips, no not that much, don’t laugh

 

The Christmas sweets are kitschy, you say. The blue ones are always coconut? Or the coconut ones always blue? The wrapper rustles on my thighs, the jelly melts onto my clit.

 

This year I didn’t fall in love, that’s your fault too. In my twenties I can’t write
about death, it won’t do. I’m tired of BKV poetry, IKEA prose and. I always forget the third one,

 

the opposing principles, that not every black is white, not every white is black. That in the new creation there’ll be no time, the tree of life will fruit
twelve times a year.

 

Love should be what I, guys are so boring, in my desperation of women’s bums, who cares what. I think of. I think of death. While I’m carting a cabbage in my rucksack, picking up dog shit, or now, here. I worry,

 

when we talk, lord, I get this far in the prayer. I told Kata, you know,
the psychologist. She asked me to try. If you’re here,

 

lie down next to me. The fairy lights won’t bother us, the pine needles
stick to the soles of your feet, you ask, what’s new, and I say
nothing much, weekday-stuff, but you know that.

 

Translated by Anna Bentley

HLO HU