I’m a desert girl
Timea Sipos
is what I tell him,
and he laughs,
de komolyan,
I grab my arm,
as if he could see
the sandstone in it.
How can I pour into words
that I don’t belong here,
where I’ve always longed to?
My name wears
a kékfestő dress.
I took my first breath
in the newly pitted shadow
of the Iron Curtain.
If I close my eyes,
what greets me
is the falsetto of wheat.
But I have nothing to do
with fog. Even the Duna
is a strange, distant relative.
In the mornings, I’d wake to the clamor
of slot machines and fall asleep
at night to the buzzing
of the cicadas.
I still carry English
numbers inside my fingers.
My throat does not
know humidity, so I drown
beside him on the rakpart.
Before us, not a ship in sight.
A deserted river stares back.
and he laughs,
de komolyan,
I grab my arm,
as if he could see
the sandstone in it.
How can I pour into words
that I don’t belong here,
where I’ve always longed to?
My name wears
a kékfestő dress.
I took my first breath
in the newly pitted shadow
of the Iron Curtain.
If I close my eyes,
what greets me
is the falsetto of wheat.
But I have nothing to do
with fog. Even the Duna
is a strange, distant relative.
In the mornings, I’d wake to the clamor
of slot machines and fall asleep
at night to the buzzing
of the cicadas.
I still carry English
numbers inside my fingers.
My throat does not
know humidity, so I drown
beside him on the rakpart.
Before us, not a ship in sight.
A deserted river stares back.
Timea Sipos is a Hungarian-American writer, translator, written- and spoken-word poet with an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her writing appears in Prairie Schooner, Passages North, Juked, and elsewhere. A 2021-2022 Steinbeck Fellow, she has received support from the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, Tin House, and elsewhere.