a rich boy even

 

there was a time i would feel ashamed

when i noticed, as women flexed and

moved their bodies, the outlines of their

underwear show through and disappear.

back then, you’d ask each day about the four boys in my class,

you knew their nicknames, every one,

though you made no secret of your desire

for a tall norwegian engineer,

and the nordic children i’d bear him,

with faraway lands in their blue eyes.

we’d swim with them in the eight-degree sea, and

this, you felt sure, would at last make us happy.

 

since then, i’ve confessed each one of those

uneraseable panty lines to you three times over.

i’ve gradually got you used to the idea that

maybe the love interests were just about you,

they were none of them handsome, just gorgeous.

like the way you learn to live, over the years,

with a poorly positioned light switch, you’re  

reluctantly adjusting to the sight of my ringless finger.

 

i know, when your eyes linger on me,

that you’re winding back time,

trying to find the dividing line

we’re drifting away from,

ever further from the polar sea,

and with all your might you’re trying

to forgive me not only for your child not being

but also your grandchild never being your own.

 

 

who are you to me

 

my flatmate

an old friend

a nice acquaintance

my cousin.

it depends who’s asking.

we just have to remember which lies

we told to who and behave accordingly.

i now barely notice the impulse to touch you,

just as i don’t pick my nose in public

however satisfying it would feel.

this too lengthens the list of natural,

instinctive and unacceptable urges.

and we, the master practitioners of

inhibitory controls, sit beside each other

and talk in two different directions.

just let’s get home and succeed today too,

behind our five-point locking door, in giving

each other a long, comfortable kiss.

 

i’m frightened, like i was twenty years ago

when crossing my eyes, that if we carry on

for too long, one day we’ll be stuck like this.

that no matter how we close and lock

and bolt up, no matter the security of concrete

walls and our scent on the furniture;

the pair of eyes looking back at me

will be sterile and wary, and no matter

what fond names i use for you, you will

not turn back into yourself.

 

 

a kiss on the forehead

 

check out them two cunts, they’re licking each other

he yells so loud the crumbs stop still in the palms of the

people feeding pigeons.

someone oughta fuck them both, good and hard

a guy on the other side roars back.

the words aren’t new to me, but they’ve shed their meaning

they need a bit o’ cock if you ask me

he yells, laughing.

the fountain forgets how the water jet goes on,

the mums stop short before snatching up their children.

i spring away from you, and it’s not rage i feel,

only shame,

like someone caught committing a cardinal sin.

the words gushing from his mouth are inarticulate.

they shock me, humiliate me,

but it would be less awful if there was somewhere to run to,

if one of these cobbled streets would take us to a place

where the passers-by were on our side.

by the time the plashing starts up again

i am following you at the sterile distance

due to a stranger.

 

 

Rebeka Kupihár was born in 1999 in Eger. She is currently a psychology student at ELTE, with a strong interest in minority groups and issues of women's existence. She has been publishing poems since 2015. Péter Závada writes that Kupihár's poems address the most current issues yet without the faintest sign of didactics or cliche, and that in these poignant poems, we are witness to an extremely sensitive linguistic and poetic staging of same-sex love, where questions of personal involvement are intertwined with questions of national destiny, and which poems operate with extraordinary precision and proportion in their simplicity.

Anna Bentley was born and educated in Britain. She taught English before moving to Budapest with her Hungarian husband, where she has lived since 2000 and has brought up two bilingual children. She completed the Hungarian Balassi Institute’s Literary Translation Programme in 2017. In 2019, her translation of Ervin Lázár's children's classic Arnica the Duck Princess was published by Pushkin Children's Press. In the same year, her translation of Anna Menyhért’s Women's Literary Tradition and Twentieth-Century Hungarian Women Writers, was published by Brill. In 2021, Iván Kvász's memoir, A Goy Guy's Kosher Stories was brought out by Hungarian publisher Gondolat in Anna's translation. Anna also translates contemporary poets, including Péter Závada, and is working on Zoltán Halasi’s creative non-fiction depiction of the culture of Polish-Lithuanian Jewry and its destruction, The Road to the Empty Sky.

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