Wednesday, May 13, 2026

System Breakdown by Kinga Fabó

Three more Fabó poems that document the bodily breakdown required for "jewels".

Anatomy

​The outlook: a retinal mirror
that lost the reflex to blink.
​The world: a shipwreck
Finally reaching the bottom.
​Intellect: a machine
Continuing to function on its own.
​Silence: the noise 
Of the missing pieces.

---------------------------------------------

Anatómia

​A látvány: a retina tükör,
ami elfelejtett pislogni.
​A világ: egy hajótörés,
ami befejezte az elsüllyedést.
​Az értelem: egy gép,
ami magától működik tovább.
​A csend: a hiányzó
alkatrészek zaja.

----------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------

While Functioning 

I thought: clean it up.
But it just evaporates.
Pigmentation has been sieved.
Crumbled back inside. In the effigy.

----------------------------------------------

Működés közben

​Gondoltam: kitakarít.
Pedig csak párologtatott.
Színeimet szűrte.
Visszagyűrte. A szoborba.

----------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------

Clinical Death

I am not city.
I am not wind.
Just anesthesia.
Where the equipment runs by itself.

----------------------------------------------

Klinikai halál

​Nem vagyok város.
Nem vagyok szél.
Csak az anesztézia.
Ahol a gép már magától jár.

Tuesday, May 12, 2026

Sham Umbilical by Kinga Fabó


This sounds like a lot of intricate gears grinding to a halt in Hungarian, but in English it's something about language grinding the heart to dust.

The seasons leap frog like in stack back to back.
They bore through the seedtime.
Hammer winter, summer.

The spicket takes off into a run.
Again and again it scrambles,
Stalled short then locked in clip once more.

The earth beneath the sea trembles.
(What a repercuss the unforeseen front
While the other hauls the sweltry.)

Shipwreck of the lips: the syllables logjam block
A splutter lurking in wait.
Gushers burst like pipes the rage of words.

Strikes. Or is hit, by syllable looming over it,
Next sketch to etch.
Not near enough time to flare into gall.

Stands out, there's a plug and play.
No one resolves friction for no one.
Strikes. Or submits to being pummeled.

Exactly the same man is the client.
Surreptitious in my shadow.
No matter what, I say or do.

No love has come: spring was not to be.
Surreptitious, perhaps, in my shadow.
Snip. I cut off your sham umbilical.

---------------------------------------------------

Hamis szál

Egymásba torlódnak az évszakok.
Átfúrják a tavaszt.
Támad a tél, a nyár.

Futásnak ered az ár.
Újra és újra nekilendül,
megtorpan és lökődik tovább.

A tenger alatt a föld rengése.
(Olyan robajjal jön a nem várt front.
Míg a másik hőséget vonszol.)

Az ajkak hajótörése: szótagok torlódása.
Lappangó dadogás.
Feltör és elönti a szavakat a düh.

Üt. Vagy megüti egy föléje
tornyosuló szótag.
Nincs idő megharagudni.

Van mása, ha kiválik.
Senki nem neheztel senkire.
Üt. Vagy hagyja magát verni.

Ugyanaz a férfi az ügyfél.
Az árnyékomban bujkál.
Mindegy, mit mondok vagy teszek.

Nincs szerelem: elmaradt a tavasz.
Talán az árnyékomban bujkál.
Nyissz. Elváglak, te hamis szál.

Monday, May 11, 2026

Three by Kinga Fabó


The Temptation

There is no word for it in Latin,
Only the skin remembers the lye
And the taste of salt on the other body.
Two poles identical, that do not repulse,
But devour each other entirely,
Like two starving wounds, when they touch.

-------------------------------------------

A kísértés 

Nincs rá szó a latinban,
csak a bőr emlékszik a lúgra,
és a másik test sós ízére.
Két azonos pólus, ami nem taszítja,
hanem befalja egymást,
mint a két éhes seb, ha összeér.

--------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------

The Throat

The word gets stuck in the larynx
Like a sharp pebble.
Not spoken this, this oscillation,
The rhythm of the blood on glottis gristle.
Latin's just a mask
Hiding in the throat
Until the scream tears right out of the skin.

-------------------------------------------

A Torok

A szó elakad a gégében,
mint egy éles kavics.
Nem beszéd ez, hanem lüktetés,
a vér ritmusa a porcon.
A latin csak a maszk,
ami elrejti a torkot,
míg a sikoly át nem szakítja a bőrt.

-------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------

The Spectacle

The eye does not forget.
It drinks in the lye, the light,
Every crack in the other's mask.
You don't look, but you record it,
Like a device void of sensation,
Just rubbing of skin and naming.
Latin is no longer face
But retina itself,
A sharp, crystallizing blindness.

-------------------------------------------

A látvány

A szem nem felejt.
Beissza a lúgot, a fényt,
a másik arcának minden repedését.
Nem nézel, hanem rögzítesz,
mint a gép, ami nem érez,
csak darálja a húst és a nevet.
A latin már nem maszk,
hanem a retina maga,
egy éles, kristályosodó vakság.

Sunday, May 10, 2026

Mother and Foal

The newborn, a shiny Frisian,
So finely tuned with mom,
Tails stroking on the same watch,

Deep with the mother's
All-knowing gaze
Of vigilance, concern, 

Being strong against
The world
For her baby,

Something in her wants
To be seen
If only to recognize

How the regal is natural,
Her pose is her grace,
Her undivided attention

To give herself
In service,
What the universe expects,

For she has a purpose at last.
It was so confusing before,
What good being a woman

With all those restrictions on
Superhuman abilities,
Unshareable ways to see

The void inside the massive heart
That lets everything
In.

But for now, she knows
And she owns, in her gait,
This knowledge.

The little one
Tears free, so trusting
She can bolt at any time

And mother becomes a child again
After a frantic moment she has to
Recover what's left her over time,

Will, speed, restlessness ...
But then she glides in place
In the regimen of the dance

As the wind blows their manes
In the same preordained way.
The little one rears up

Like a knight in chess claiming
The air itself
As her own

But her mother's scowl,
So stern and disapproving,
So false

Cuts just enough
Moxie
The goal remains

But the means
Have been modified,
Things have been learned.

Someone thought to put
Indian paintbrush blue
Blankets on most of the horses

To protect them from the flies they know
Are coming, this row of them,
Like all of them had the same mama.

But her individuality comes
From how she can deliver all
Her new to life requires,

There's no gratitude except
In the air, which her filly breathes
As if the source of love is always there.

Saturday, May 9, 2026

Auroras Evoked from Dry Grass

A young Arabian
Gets in whoever's face she can 
Attract
To plead for freedom.

She turns her neck
Like a lasso.

Such authenticity
Does not come natural to us,
We hem and hew
At the border

Between ourselves
And the others,
Wondering what to disclose
And what to keep protected

Or at least undefended, undefined.

That's how much the Arabian
Waving her tail
Seems to whip
Against our hides

Like there's something
We must do
With someone else's discontent
Besides endure it

The ticking clock, the ultimatum 
Of wanting 
That makes us gnats in
Wind-blind circling

Attracted to scent and movement
And that ineffable instinct.

We just flow in whatever way
We can, spend our energy
In balancing what we think
We want

With what we think they want,
Trying to find that perfect point,
That destination temperature

And it always just
Eludes our grasp,

What we're reaching for
Is the other side of us.

The game is not to touch.

Thursday, May 7, 2026

The Eccentric Quest for the Universal

The Haflinger with the white tail
Still sees a point in playing,
Chasing the sun, saying hello
Instead of playing hard to get
With a mourning look.

The prompt to be genuine is still
Intact, unlike the new mule
Who you know had something bad 
Happen to bray so over the top of
The silence at feeding time.

The time to live is when you are young,
Before you discover that the others
Are not like you. Some never know this,
They never lose their youthful exuberance,
But most make an effort

To learn the most important thing first:
That what you don't like, you are not,
But it's not until you clear the mirror of it
That you know you are
Something, a specific frequency,

Not just a taste bud sampling all the hay
For the elusive grain. That something
Is a covering, for you to carry, the next
Best thing to a body, a comfort to know
That the mold they broke

When they made you
Was never really a mold at all
Just a set of possibilities
You could choose among
For the choice that wasn't given.

That's how it starts.
The colony in Alpha Centauri
With its hardtack and scrambled signals
Wouldn't exist without the preference
For the impossible,

A blinking point
Of light 
In the vastnesses of space,
Far enough for dreams to create,
Dreams that didn't exist.

Fossil by Kinga Fabó

One of Fabó's later poems, ​A kövület reads like an autobiography of someone erased.

​The garden no longer responds.
Just the lye vestige lingers whitening the stones
Where the mire and the ravaging have withdrawn.
You no longer savor the taintings
Because your tongue turned as well to stone
Beneath a silent, Latin legenda.

​No flower sprouted from inside you
But the silence crystalized.
A cold, transparent fixity
And it wants nothing, but to be,
While the wind still wears your name
As the wall of the house collapses.

----------------------------------------------------

​A kövület 

​A kert már nem válaszol.
Csak a lúg fehér nyoma maradt a köveken,
ahol a sár és az erőszak elvonult.
Már nem érzed az ízeket,
mert a nyelved is kővé dermedt,
egy néma, latin felirat alatt.

​Nem virág hajtott ki belőled,
hanem a csönd kristályai.
Hideg, átlátszó fegyelem,
ami nem akar semmit, csak lenni,
miközben a szél a nevedet
koptatja el a ház falán.

March by Kinga Fabó

Fabó here makes the argument that March not April is the cruelest month for the sensitive ones.

​Spring doesn't just come. It breaks the door,
Like a lush who cannot find his key
And proceeds to attack the obstacle
To unlock winter into icy shards
Shattering the quiet hothouse glass
In an avalanche of rank, unprocessed earth.

Everything is sludge and forcing.
The buds don't snap, they detonate and pullulate
Like wounds that just can't take it anymore.
And you stand inside the draft,
Latin labels in your hands, 
And watch the green 
Harrow through the garden.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Marcius

​A tavasz nem jön. Hanem betör.
Mint egy részeg, aki nem találja a kulcsát,
és vállal nekitámad az ajtónak.
Szilánkosra töri a telet,
az üvegházak jég-csöndjét,
és ránk borítja a nyers, büdös földet.

​Minden csupa sár és erőszak.
A rügyek nem pattannak, hanem robbannak,
mint a sebek, amik nem bírják tovább.
És te csak állsz a huzatban,
kezedben a latin nevekkel,
és nézed, ahogy a zöld düh
átgázol a kerten.

Wednesday, May 6, 2026

When Nothing but Traces of the Dream Can Be Seen

Hugh Nguyen is a shoo-in to win
With his Proven Leadership
In the middle of horse country,
A scale model in some ways

But in others, it's the middle of nowhere
Where the one road can be roped off
By chippers for each emergency
And they are frequent

With the micro-monsoons 
And Santa Ana corridors 
In these well-oaked canyons 
Clear to Riverside.

A bald with blues
Glows now
In the incredible radiance of nature 
On all cylinders,

Now helping the earth
Lift us with it
To a higher version
Of the same place.

The baby birds would give themselves
Back to source 
As gleefully as mushrooms
Were they not programmed for survival

So we get the fear, and the animals
Take care of their own removal;
It didn't have to be this way, 
And it isn't:

There are plenty of birds to go around,
Though every human stumbles to see
So many falling from the sky newborn
And grey, opened too wide

To a world that does nothing but give.
The air is colder now. 
The hawks don't look at it 
As if they are baby chicks

But a reading of the horizon,
What is there, available
To discover what it is 
And the what it is not

That is the source,
Also what it is, as the pale is,
Blue eyes going to infinity
Our only true home.

They still talk today
How, when the last fire came
They medivaced the horses by copter,
Before they took the people

And all of them were saved,
None of the few homes here were damaged.
They're lucky that way, they opt out
Of what nature doesn't want them to do --

Everyone takes orders
From the truth that can be seen
In the sky, just like the whirring
Birds their merry-go-rounds of sound

Saying "me" in all the countless ways,
Advertising themselves to the one ear,
The sun and the hawk, who also
Only follows what is ordered.

The Herbalist by Kinga Fabó

The title poem from her 1988 collection, A herba‑szakértő

You insist, you understand herbs from a distance.
You're familiar with lethal essences
Yet it's just their names that you know,
A Latin identikit, a taxonomy.
You don't feel their taste on your tongue,
You knew them before you would've swallowed.

I have gnosis, of what each herb wants,
Which herbs will kill, and which herbs
Just put you to sleep a little,
Which ones gnaw into your flesh
And which ones turn your soul green
As the cold lye leaches through.

You just collect them, shrivel them up,
To press velvety paper in between,
An inventory of perishing.
But death I gobble down
And wait my turn, that from my insides
A flower will bloom, on the other side.

---------------------------------------------------------

Azt hiszed, te értesz a füvekhez.
Hogy ismered a mérgeket.
Pedig csak a nevüket tudod.
A latin neveket, a rendszertant.
De nem érzed az ízüket a nyelveden,
mielőtt még lenyelted volna őket.

Én tudom, melyik fű mit akar.
Melyik akar megölni, és melyik
csak elaltatni egy kicsit.
Melyik fű az, amelyik a húsodba rág,
és melyik, amelyik a lelkedet
mossa át hideg, zöld lúggal.

Te csak gyűjtöd őket, szárítod,
vékony papírok közé préseled.
Leltározod a pusztulást.
De én megeszem a halált,
és várom, hogy belülről
hajtson ki belőlem a virág.

A Wall by Kinga Fabó

As other Eastern Europeans celebrated the toppling of walls in the early 90s, Fabó discovered a deeper, more intractable one.

The gap between: a wall: not stone.
Not porous like brick, not prefab cement.
But this teeming, tongueless flesh.
Nothing is permitted across:
No flashbulb, no voice drop, no appetite 
Just detachment's clammy sweat.

----------------------------------------------------------

Közöttünk a fal: nem kő.
Nem is tégla, nem is beton.
Hanem ez a sűrű, néma hús.
Ami nem enged át semmit:
se fényt, se hangot, se vágyat.
Csak a magány hideg verítékét. 

Tuesday, May 5, 2026

Adventures with the Snoot

Dr. Seuss trees are native to this region
But the indigenous in caves put the curse on anyway,
Even the flightless cormorants -- whose babies are black
Or ash-grey, poking at blue necks with beaks like pliers.

Sea lions dance in what once was the land of holes,
The sacred Kumeyaay portals of birth, where kayakers now 
Joust for an inside view ... but keep their distance, as seals spin
And laugh at them, blow out fountains of brine.

Horizongoers wander onto the guano-colored spit to take selfies
As pelicans swallow. There's a stair through the red rock, film-noir dim
On wet wooden planks 144 steps down to an elven face outlined
Like a magic jigsaw door in granite otherwise endless …

But the only things endless now are the Soviet Realism halls on campus,
Where neural circuits go to be reprogrammed and a brutalist 
Spaceship holds the records for the best and brightest
With working apps and scalable plans by their senior years

Or they bring shame upon their D&D encounters and families;
Others more realistic think the beach with purple trees is the place to be
Homeless or a permanent student, though even they have lost hope
On new knowledge as all the subfiles have piled up.

Yet if there's one who knows there were bones below here from
38,000 years ago you would never know it, from their etiquette.
That's what academics are like, as proud of their ignorance 
As guilty there are others as smart as them

But it's less than 1% of the population even attempt to get in
This prison of the children's book, about an equal percentage as
The landmass of Maine's apportioned, or better yet, what no one says
The Universe itself peoples in much smaller fractions.

Melancholy of Jason Kleander, Poet in Kommagini, A.D. 595

From the Greek of C.P. Cavafy

Age wears my body, tears at my form,
Maimed by a cold-blooded blade.
I have no fortitude, none whatsoever.
I run in desperation, Art of Poetry
To herbs and potions you might know,
Experiments in narcosis, in fantasy and word choice.

Maimed by a cold-blooded blade --
Bear your pharmacy, Art of Poetry,
Keep the pain of the wound – for a moment – not felt.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Η Λύπη του Ιάσων Κλεάνδρου, Ποιητού εν Κομμαγηνή, 595 μ.Χ.

Το γήρασμα του σώματος και της μορφής μου
είναι πληγή από φρικτό μαχαίρι.
Δεν έχω εγκαρτέρησι καμιά.
Εις σε προστρέχω Τέχνη της Ποιήσεως,
που κάπως ξέρεις από φάρμακα·
νάρκης του άλγους δοκιμές, εν Φαντασία και Λόγω.

Είναι πληγή από φρικτό μαχαίρι.—
Τα φάρμακά σου φέρε, Τέχνη της Ποιήσεως,
που κάμνουνε — για λίγο — να μη νιώθεται η πληγή.

Monday, May 4, 2026

A Word by Kinga Fabó

Fabó believed that words trained you to become a slave.

A word: not a baud.
Small, hungry animals, who attack
My flesh, they like to masticate, ruminate.
They parasitize my silence,
Annihilate the delicious gist,
Before the uttering can take place.

---------------------------------------------

A szavak: nem ékszerek.
Hanem apró, éhes állatok,
amik a húsomba rágják magukat.
Élősködnek a csöndemen,
és felzabálják a jelentést,
mielőtt még kimondanám.

Friday, May 1, 2026

The Brave Pose of the Lizard on the Post

Managers don't know and most importantly don't care
What you are doing, and I am nothing if not an
Aficionado of alienation as the once-a-year Civil War
Reenactment happens today it just so happens

And we are forced to contemplate how Peter the Great
Saved us from the Rothschilds, the Haze Hazel
Conundrum, as usual, Holderlin's roomie Hegel
Drew up the whole charade: people can be made

To fight for opposing sides, and whoever wins
Gets to vie with a brand new shadow. It works
Every time ... at Haymarket, where they doubled down,
The bankers, on no happy May Day

In the fetid cities that circled their factories,
Where the kids ate sweetened kibble so that mama
Could staple cotton onto a dyeing tool -- one day of flowers
And fertility poles would never be alloted

For populations that had known it in the homeland,
Before the entire world took a refugee boat to the alien,
Fragmented like they let you have your old lives,
Full of fermentation yes but never the blessed,

The icons one must hide away, to acknowledge there was
Once at least a memory before the construction of new ones
Was decreed, which only really meant they had to take back
The old ones, the figurines of no material purpose

But that's never the point of such interventions, there's only
So much loosh available in any prison population at one
Time, so the restive horses must be dewormed, and they used
The Frankfurt philosopher, those burghers

To capture the universe of opposites microcosmed microscopic
As below so above, in their puppeteer strings, in this case
The thresher and the kerosene salesmen, after Haymarket
In a smoky cafe cave they doubled down again

With Pinkertons "Workers are denied a right to any days ...
It's what the traffic will bear." Why not a Russian one
To play with, where, if the rotten spoils were shared each to his
Ability each to his bitter remorse: let's close the churches,

Stop all paychecks, let the government be even worse, in some
Central office with no fixed address, no phone, no way to
Appeal to the void, waiting endless for the electrician to ring
Or the beets to return to the market with eyes, who would mind?

Something like that was prophesied 
By the partners in crime in the room, when territories
Were drawn, and Russia still red from that Abe 
Lincoln business came up short ...

And the way to make all the goombahs
And fly-by-night peddlers of cheap medicinals look good,
Almost holy, was to create a world  that would endure
What it was created for, our indifference

For long enough it finally stopped, deals opened up the curtain
Where what was on the stage was always more hat than cattle --
The thought that it's for us, all of it: the landings on the moon,
The mysticism introduced to meekly cede the earth and its Vietnams

And polio vaccines rendered unto Caesar, once again, 
As the alienated intellectual finds cause again in opposition,
That is, he is part of the scene, where he can be tight but right,
Pressed-in yet destined ... and he will be redeemed.

And he will be, in the end, let's call him Harry
With his Haymarket maps and anarchist's cookbooks
Of Molotov cocktail recipes, for scholarly reasons of course,
And now he has a brand new tome, taking stock of

What the Situationists once sussed: the system was rigged,
Crooked at every cross-joint, impossible to get the attention
Of its vast, multitudinous voice -- he never did think of gratitude
Even though there is no May Day, and never was.

Anatomy of a Scream by Kinga Fabó

Linguist Fabó wrote this after the fall of Communism, while researching "the limits of the sayable." 

A scream: not sound. A round of space
Advancing instantly, in an empty rotunda
Where the breathing and the tongue succumb.
There's no lalia inside, no inside words.
Just the white effulgences of bones 
And the red flesh helpless again.

----------------------------------------------------------

A sikoly anatómiája

A sikoly: nem hang. Hanem tér.
Egy hirtelen táguló, üres csarnok,
ahol a tüdő és a torok összeomlik.
Nincs benne lalia, nincs benne szó.
Csak a csontok fehér izzása,
és a hús tehetetlen vöröse.

from A fül (The Ear, 1992).

Bile by Kinga Fabó

A late-1980's short collected in A herba-szakértő (The Herbalist).

The sky's a bile-poisoned pelisse over me.
Murky, bulky, it suffocates.
The stellar clock? It's an icebox sweat
On the universal brow.
No capaciousness. Just this one cramped
Industrial-lung-colored unresponsive.

----------------------------------------------------

Az ég mérgezett palást rajtam.
Nehéz, sötét, és fojtogat.
A csillagok? Hideg veríték
az univerzum homlokán.
Nincs tágasság. Csak ez a szűk,
ólomszínű mozdulatlanság.

Poison by Kinga Fabó

There are no translations of Kinga Fabó the literally mad Hungarian into English that I know of, a gap you will see from this poem needs to be addressed, and I get to, for awhile.

You I vigil keep guard, you my poison.
Fit, the highest grade venom.
What I lack they can't have.
I won't down you myself.
Just notice.
That's when I turn my head and face in
So you see: I concoct without you
(But a vibration lurking in my throat).

-----------------------------------------------

Racun

Úgy vigyázok rád, mint a mérgemre.
Szép, tiszta méreg vagy.
Nem adlak senkinek.
Én se iszom meg.
Csak nézlek.
Aztán elfordítom a fejem.
Hogy lásd: elvagyok nélküled is.
(Csak a torkomban lüktet valami.)

I Went

One last breath of Cavafy's rarefied air on his birthday week, from 1917.

I didn't hold myself back. I let myself go completely and fled.
The pleasures, they were only half real,
Only half-revolved inside my mind.
I went inside the photo-luminous night
And I drank from the strong retsina
Like the heroes of hedonism do. 

----------------------------------------------------------

Επήγα

Δεν εδεσμεύθηκα. Τελείως αφέθηκα και επήγα.
Στες απολαύσεις, που μισό πραγματικές,
μισό γυρνάμενες μες στο μυαλό μου ήσαν,
επήγα μες στην φωτισμένη νύχτα.
Κ' ήπια από δυνατά κρασιά, καθώς
που πίνουν οι ανδρείοι της ηδονής.

Thursday, April 30, 2026

Coming Home from Greece

From an unpublished Cavafy fragment (1914)

And so we're almost near, to be delivered.
Cape Maleus materializes;
We are finally in our own.
Cheers, Peloponnesian Sea! 

Let's not hide it from ourselves -- we are Greek.
What else could we be but Greek?
Still the Levant stirs up my appetites and shakes my heart
... They are not ashamed of the way they speak the Greek.
 
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Επιστροφή από την Ελλάδα

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είμαστε πια στα νερά μας.
Χαίρε, ω θάλασσα της Πελοποννήσου.

Ας μην κρυβόμαστε· είμαστε κι εμείς Έλληνες —
τι άλλο είμαστε παρά Έλληνες;
Αλλά με αγάπες και με συγκινήσεις της Ασίας,
...που όμως την ελληνική λαλιά δεν την ντρέπονται.