Please join us over Zoom on Saturday, October 12th, at 12PM EST, for the 17th installment of the 'I Think I Can't Speak For Everyone Here' reading series. Featured reader will be Réka Nyitrai.
Email bluejawedsnake@gmail.com for the Zoom info and to sign-up for the open mic.
~
Réka Nyitrai is a Romanian-Hungarian poet who discovered her poetic voice at forty-one, mainly through Japanese short forms, but particularly haiku.
Her debut haiku collection “While Dreaming Your Dreams” won the Touchstone Distinguished Books Award for 2020. Following this, she began to write both prose and lineated poems. She writes in English, her third language. "Moon flogged", her full-length debut collection was released in September 2024 by Broken Sleep Books.
I can count on my teeth the number of your teeth gone soft in the knees of boys. There’s nothing you could’ve done to make me beautiful. The ghost of body image believes in one ghost. We’re all too young but see anyway the unfinished angel blowing on the stomach of christ. Mother from her father wants only the pea behind his eye. Distance is clickbait for god.
The hurt horse beats to the lake a delirious deer. Leave the deer out. Let it change color. Let the horse fill with mud so that when its neck breaks the neck of mud also breaks. Raise a frog an arthritic god. Scarecrow, crucifix, body bag. I laugh in church and in the motherless church of war. Brevity’s longest male. Meal. Male.
Rabbits stick to the tree of blood. I hear everything that I believe. It was snowing. Your father was choking. Bone, he said, in the bread. They don’t even cry.
We had three good dogs. Three of my brothers shared a dress. Neighbors shook televisions to hear the ocean. Bones faked brokenness. It’s not hard to say it was real. In a city of bathrooms, puking is a language. Taking pills in a parked car shrinks god and/or roadkill. Sleep is smaller than an angel. Bodies eat pain.
The water is gonna reach us. Actors are going to tell us how they got into character. Animals are going to name the angels. A bomb named lifelong will see god and then see god only. I am already forgetting how it ends. I had little songs and thought of my children. Pain burned its own music.
I was five
Told I’d be penniless
Giving off a vibe
In the emptiness
I was five
Praying in the bathroom
over hives
Deprived
of onlyness
Pawing
god’s side
with loneliness
~
I gave myself a paw
Moon Flogged
poems, Réka Nyitrai
Broken Sleep, 2024
I adore the poems in Réka Nyitrai’s Moon Flogged. I worship without purpose. I am lost here where loss gets the nothing it deserves. This is the work of a third language. Of an equal. I don’t mean equal as something controlled. I mean an equality built on an erratic focus and condemned by unusual landlords. It’s an expectant nowhere that goes everywhere. The verse here combs like a ghost barber through the hair of those distracted by the abandoned erotica of a neckless god. This is a poetry of visual sense and illogical logistics. Lovely and odd, it’s the alien bird that feathers its spontaneous theft with secondhand keystrokes and it's the domestic fossil brushing for fingerprints rolled across the weak monitors of our projected tenderness. I mean to get carried. Away.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
I reach into a dream and pull out no small puberty. Every sister is terrifying. Hundreds of frogs jump differently away from a pond with two shadows. I can’t afford a ghost but can a demon. It looks at my ghost. Then at my food. Days from now, an entire train is used to transport the bones of a single mouse. I think I’m asleep. A sound thinks I’m asleep. Writing isn’t that important. You could die here and everyone would know.
Every day is not your last.
God doesn’t write.
They cut off my hand, put it in the microwave, and left me to die.
I became the loss
fish
scrapeghost.
I made it to the microwave, but it was locked.
I didn’t understand.
Then did.
The microwave was wrong.
Bliss goat, god bless
I don’t
need to live
You’ve loved god long enough to break her bones. This poem is about trees when it’s not about weeping. Weapons all say the same thing. Mistaken for language the grammar of cruelty.
kingsoftrain 