Numero III by Attila Balogh

Photo by Martins Krastins  

Numero III by Attila Balogh

Translation by Gabor G. Gyukics and Michael Castro

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