Poems by Mónika Ferencz

(Translated by Juana Adcock)
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Cepheids – Sefayds
(extracts)


1. 
We’re sitting on the bed next to each other.
We can’t decide whether to go to the café nearby
or take the dog for a walk.
I fix breakfast, then we play a game,
the rules of which we both
remember differently.
The dog is sitting in the front room and watching.
It’s called Sorg, you say. But I don’t know the word’s meaning.
Every day, when we get up, you quizz me
and teach me a new word.
I ask you to tell me more about yourself instead
but you turn to the wall and start whistling.


2.
We’re sitting on the bed next to each other.
You don’t know how you got here.
The air in the room has cooled and you find it soothing.
I feed you, give you water. I call you Mira.
Mira means wonderful.
We’re sitting on the bed next to each other.
I pronounce your name and caress you.


You repeat your name and the movements of my hand,
as the stars contract in the sky one by one.
Their shrinking casts a shadow is cast over the room.


3.
We’re sitting in a café next to each other.
Tuesday, three o’clock. There’s no one 
here except for us, the bartender
and a brown dog
shuffling between the chairs.


Under the table, our legs are touching.
You know this dog, but you apologise
because you cannot say its name.
You go through the menu. I want to die
you whisper, and your face darkens
like the September sky. I order two coffees.
The dog is stretched out between us.
We sit wordless for days.
Our legs are touching under the table.


4.
You’re reading a book about the celestial body Mira.
Which is cyclically contracting and expanding in the sky.
You’re trying to define
the way it slips away between freedom and love.
Mira Ceti looses its footing
and topples or collapses to the ground from the sky.
Your palm is sweaty and dark,
you open it out and palp its highest hill.
You imagine its locust baryons
breaking off and colliding.
Expanding and contracting.
Their movement is independent from you,
leaves you unchanged.


6.
You don’t know what kind of celestial body you are. 
You read books and watch
documentary series all day long.
You dream that I’m the Moon, she’s the Sun.
So upon waking you reach the conclusion that you’re the Earth.
You have no other task than to feed and water
the creatures wandering around in you.
But your seas dry out,
your forests are ablaze
and you start worrying about what happens next.
I want to be good, you say to the dark
but in the room there is no one
who could appease you.


10.
I lie on the floor with a hole between my ribs
from which blood is leaking. I slip my finger into it
but the bleeding won’t stop, and the sweat trickling down my skin
starts to burn the wound.
Light percolates from the next room.
I can’t turn my head
without discomfort
but still it takes me only minutes to fall asleep.
Someone outside starts whistling.


11.
I lie on the ground
the blood is leaking from the floorboards into my ribs
I live alone with my dog. It’s called Sorg.
I should take it out for a walk,
but I’d rather fix breakfast.


Someone is knocking, I open the door. You stand there
at the bottom of the staircase, holding the hand of an unknown woman
I ask her name, you shake your head,
you show me her palm, and your face darkens
like the September sky.

Mónika Ferencz was born in March 1991 in Budapest. She has been publishing poems in various journals since 2013, and since 2015 translations as well. She received the Mihály Babits Translators’ Grant in spring 2016, and participated in literary translation workshops organized by the Petőfi Literary Museum in Budapest (2016) and the Association of Young Writers (FISZ, 2017). Her first volume of poetry was published in 2017.

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