The empty virgin white offers itself, odorless
it miscarries. Untouched, what is at other times open
and awaiting pollination. Or there, the unable-to-fall
black: the shared time of this year’s and last’s possibility
on the branches. Next year, stuff already dead springs
from the bud-encoded withering. Unrecognizable,
unknown, and what is behind it, shapeless.
The ovulation process is product presentation.
Enough for a spectacle, impotent aesthetics.
And meanwhile the timeless sham-fertility rages
on the monitors: it wasn’t today National Geographic became
a porn channel. The genetics of nature, untouched and pure:
alignment to patterns unfit for human consumption.
But infertile is not incapable of life, it’s just model-
like, and what is behind it, aimless.
When the remains, the unfit, again win meaning:
the unreasonably thick, black milk flowing from
men’s nipples. And one’s feet will again
play an indispensable role in their survival.
But the pruning of the young branch, the removal of the root
recalls the violent act of the abortion cut.
An unremarkable, routine knife movement, the embryo’s
amputation along split skin, to anaesthetize
and deprive the body of something half-finished.
There will be nothing to cram back into the umbilical cavity.
The steaming aperture plundered, the cord cut,
the silent source of an age before memory, carrying
on itself the traces of unmistakable intervention.
And as far as it concerns men: forever functionless.
We launched this project as part of the Bázis website with the support of the Minority Culture Fund. Its aim is to translate contemporary Hungarian poetry in Slovakia into Slovak and English. We want to create a virtual anthology of contemporary Hungarian poetry in Slovakia.