Poet Tree

Another micro-poem poking at the macro-cosm. Now I don't feel like changing Clothes. I don't feel like smiling Back. I had a male gu...

A continuation of yesterday's poem , sort of . Neither beautiful, both magnetic. Why then bother with a horoscope, Wars, the turning of ...

Despite the Hungarian double entendre where "meleg" means both "warm" and "homosexual," the sentiment of losin...

Another Fabó poem about imbalances in relationship dynamics. Empty the room is, and the bed, And you are the one Who resembles me: you Are t...

This one had to be rescued from deep inside the Magyar culture to approach the universal. This woman cute? No I Won’t let that one carry the...

Fabó the linguist subverts gender here in non-gendered Hungarian, but it's for a greater, historical reckoning. I’m nominal female in th...

Fabó  was a master of portraying inward states of isolation in stark, physical terms. A mythic altar where they would be presented, that’s h...

Three more Fabó poems that document the bodily breakdown required for "jewels". Anatomy ​The outlook: a retinal mirror That lost i...

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

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 identica...

One of Fabó's later poems, ​A kövület reads like an autobiography of someone erased. ​The garden no longer responds. Just the lye vestig...

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...

The title poem from her 1988 collection, A herba‑szakértő You insist, you understand herbs from a distance. You're familiar with lethal ...

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

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 r...

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 mastica...

Linguist Fabó wrote this after the fall of Communism, while researching "the limits of the sayable."  A scream: not sound. A round...

A late-1980's short collected in A herba-szakértő (The Herbalist). The sky's a bile-poisoned pelisse over me. Murky, bulky, it suffo...

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 ...

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 ...