Ten True Confessions by Bettina Simon

 

TEN TRUE CONFESSIONS

by Bettina Simon

Translated by Kristen Herbert 

 

I went to visit mom,
but a photo was waiting in her place.
I decided to write her a poem.

I address her, and then briefly,
as if I were planting onions in the garden,
I explain that I will not be coming anymore.

From now on, I’ll have a lot more to do.
I help strangers
remember their childhood,
and if they didn’t have one, I make something up.

Slowly, like how the sick walk circles
around the hospital smoking cigarettes,
it became a letter, and I repeated it, like a poem.

Translator

Kristen Herbert is native to the Chicago area, but spent several years in Hungary as an English teacher. She is a co-editor and founder of the bilingual Hungarian-English literary journal The Penny Truth and serves on the masthead of Hungarian Literature Online. She is a current student in fiction at the MFA in Creative Writing at University of California-Riverside.

Author

Bettina Simon was born in Miskolc, Hungary, in 1990. Her first anthology of poems Beach(Strand) received wide accolades since its publication in 2018 by the Attila József Circle. In 2019, Bettina Simon earned a Zsigmond Móricz creator’s scholarship to complete her second anthology of poems. Since 2012, she has been a regular contributor to important Hungarian literary journals, and her works can be read in Prae, Élet és irodalom, and Alföld.