“Extracooler Turbo” by Agnes Marton

He was my favourite dancer.

Jumped to and fro in my hidden,

sweat-finger-drawn-map gardens,

became my inner compass.

I called him Extracooler Turbo,

astonished how vibrant,

perturbing my leopard was,

tsunami-fuelled tick-tack,

and at times how smoothing;

when I won at lush wrestles,

I felt so well-looked-after.

I fed him my flesh,

cleaned his fur with my own tongue,

slept listening to his tales.

But one day I went astray,

broke the close-distant mew-mew,

swirled in the catless pawpath,

fastened my steps at Stop signs,

murmurred the darkness ‘Don’t purr,

forgive my temp forever.

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Agnes Marton is a Hungarian-born poet with a background in academic publishing and former Managing Editor for the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. For eight years, Marton have been working as a linguist in Luxembourg at the Court of Justice for the European Union. She takes part in numerous exhibitions and art projects with my poems: ‘Opposition’ (Oakland, USA), ‘Flow’ (St Gingolph, Switzerland), ‘So What’ (Wellington, New Zealand), ‘Stone Project’ (Hammond, USA), ‘Gateway Project’ (Jemez Springs, USA), ‘Art et Jardin’ (Saarbrucken, Germany). She has performed her poems in five countries, last time in Manchester.