Réka Nyitrai : Two poems

 

 

The Fathers

Bird of prey. Absence, burning. Landscape with no rivers. Sunset stolen from my mother. // Red moon. Red snow. Red loneliness. A purse full of paper money. // A white granular fluid you either love or hate. A hatched pigeon egg. An eager pencil. My most faithful plagiarist. // A grave, that in five years, I have never once visited.

 

 

The Mothers

Heart filled with rainwater. Presence, towering. Landscape with rivers. // Dirty window. Pills. Rotten meat. // A rasping mouthpart that pierces the epidermis of the mirror causing angels to appear yellow or bronze. // A muted cry for help.

 

 

 

 

 

Réka Nyitrai is a spell, a sparrow, a lioness's tongue — a bird nest in a pool of dusk. A Romanian-Hungarian poet, she learned English (her primary language of writing) later in life, moving fluently between prose poems, haiku, and free verse, often channeling the feminist surrealist currents of Leonora Carrington, Aase Berg, and Aglaja Veteranyi. In 2020, she released a bilingual (Spanish and English) collection of haiku known as While Dreaming Your Dreams (Mano Ya Mano Books) which received a Touchstone Distinguished Books Award. She then released her debut full-length poetry collection, Moon Flogged, in 2024 through Broken Sleep Books, and recently released a chapbook through Ethel Zine called With a Swan's Nest on Her Back. Her second full-lenght poetry collection Split / Game of Little Deaths will be out with Piżama Press in May 2026.

Lesle Lewis : Two poems

 

 

Lake


Doctors say you have only weeks yet.

You go early to bed and draw meadows.  

One day remembers a better one as she crawls out of self-consciousness.

Whatever happens happens now.

Red painted monuments bloom.

It’s a messy, wild-growing grief.

One child ventures out, the child, lovely and bespeckled, the child, a powerhouse, the child grown up, a person capable and remarkable.

Then the ocean comes for the land.

Drought is causing the reappearance of the canyon.

And of the split level house on a lake.

 

Dumped


I can’t begin to think how to begin again.  

Okayness is not good enough.

Good enough is not good enough.

Do you care about the details of my life?

Is it generous for me to share them?

Generous of you to listen?

Now draw your face.

Get out of bed.

Then, and only then, go ahead and despair.

You feel badly about feeling badly.

It’s a thing trying to understand itself.

If you sink into it, you find nothing.

When you get there, you won’t know anything, even who you are.  

Dreams are passing scenery.  

A tiny tick tock dozes in the field.

You wake for a break from the sleeping.

You hang onto the dawn.  

You have a bird for a face and a string for a mouth.

It will be a summer morning.

You will eat mushrooms and potatoes.  

The dead will come back as hungry animals.

You feel my hunger, so maybe you can help me.

I feel your hunger too.

Someone has figured it out so it’s a story.

How one thing is like another is also how it’s not.

Ahead is not a place to get to.

Important questions will maintain their identities.

I’m sadder, dumber, more tired now.

If you want uplifting, lift yourself.

This gets better or worse or this gets bogged down.

The truck needs more than a jump.

Much ink is dumped.

 

 

 

 

 

Lesle Lewis is the author of six full-length collections of poems, including her debut collection, Small Boat, which was the winner of the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize. She's released two books through Alice James Books, one book with Cleveland State University Poetry Center, and one with Fence Books. Her sixth collection, John's Table, is out with Piżama Press in May 2026. She lives in the rough New Hampshire woods with the rest of the trees.