I told the older kids it was in my ear. They shook me a few times and took turns looking. I rubbed my jaw as if to mark myself removed from the tender convincing of permanence. To each other, even now, they describe the wasp. Death makes god last longer.
A violinist puts a knife to the neck of a doll.
Stop drinking.
Teach the baby to suck in its stomach. Go bitemark bald to the burning of tire swings. Pretend you can be nostalgic in America. Do this by having at all times handfuls of woozy spiders that prevent you from making guns of your hands. Do this by drinking. I wasn’t worried but then my phone started working in a dream. In heaven, every mirror is an exit wound.
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.
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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.
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reflection by Barton Smock
kingsoftrain 