Songs for 3:45 AM
Pre-Season
I rode here facing backwards. The cabins
are whiter, the water is deeper, than last
year—the same things still available
in the stores. The beach is dead,
that’s why I came. There’s a future
here: it’s pre-season,
with everything still to come.
I look around, I should get a beer.
And a greener green and a lighter blue.
Because my memory is white,
like the cabins you change in.
I left my laptop at home.
It’s full of your pictures, and I don’t
want to caress the screen anymore—to lie,
because I don’t need honesty, I need you.
I know precisely how the ending will play out.
I’ll say: I should get a beer.
And how I was happy. How. We’ll never know.
Like what the only sleeping person
on a crashing plane must dream about.
COMING ON 31st March 2025!
Published by the Okapi Press, in Budapest, Hungary.
67 pages, paperback
ISBN 978-615-02-2758-0
MÁRTON SIMON is a Hungarian poet, performer, and translator. He is the author of five poetry collections and one spoken word album. Songs for 3:45 AM (Dalok a magasföldszintről) was his first poetry collection in 2010. Simon is a proud MacDowell fellow, and has received a Makói Medal award, a Móricz Zsigmond Literary Fellowship, a Visegrád Fund Literary Fellowship, and the Horváth Péter Literary Fellowship, which celebrates the best Hungarian writer below 35.
His work has been translated into German, Polish, Turkish, Romanian, and Bulgarian. English translations of his poems by Tímea Sipos have appeared in Waxwing, Michigan Quarterly Review, Duende, Hungarian Literature Online, Trafika Europe and Modern Poetry in Translation, among others. Songs for 3:45 AM was first published in English with The Offending Adam Press in 2021.
In 2024 he started his own independent publishing label, Okapi Press. He has an MA in Japanese Studies. He lives with his wife and daughter in Budapest, Hungary.
TIMEA SIPOS is a Hungarian-American author and literary translator with an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and a certificate of translation from the Balassi Institute. Her writing and translations appear in Prairie Schooner, Passages North, and Washington Square Review, among others. Her work has received support from MacDowell, the Steinbeck Fellowship, PEN America, and more. Her poetry chapbook, The Shapes Our Tongues Make (Bottlecap Press, 2024), is all about her love for Budapest, Hungary and the Mojave Desert.
