Margo Berdeshevsky

IT IS STILL BEAUTIFUL TO HEAR THE HEART BEAT*

January 25, 2018 Berdeshevsky Margo

IT IS STILL BEAUTIFUL TO HEAR THE HEART BEAT*


 

It’s 3 AM. The crows on one leg or none are already starving for infant nests. A few leaves hang on
still. A prayer of godwits enters the dream from the upper left quadrant. No, I tell the dream-maker,

 

no, make it a lamentation of swans. The times demand it. Instead, I’m given an affliction of starlings
tearing the leaves that remain as they fly, and the dream is ruined. What’s real is in bed with me,

 

mounts me, slides in like a husband entering with the unquestioned privilege of his sexual
entitlement. Drowsy, I open my thighs to him, to it, to the day. To my habit of saying “Accept it, I’ll

 

die tonight,” each night when I pull the quilts for sleep, so that I can practice belief. The next day is
new. Always. Fair or fetid, bring with me only what I dare to remember. Opening new eyes, there is

 

the baby in her crib, her shape nothing I wanted. Waking is waking. What’s real is the child with her
badly sculpted brain, her damaged possibility of dream. What’s real is our day in a diseased year and

 

the baby has come out wrong. Blame it on the chemicals. Blame it on the sting of the genus Aedes
aegypti
, white stripes on her legs, a marking in the form of a lyre on her upper thorax. Say that she

 

comes at dawn. What’s real is I was another one of the harmed, the infant, more so, but less harmed
than the worse harmed than we.

 

Awake, it is still beautiful to hear the heart beat, I repeat. A prayer of godwits hovers at my door.
I am so deeply awake.

 

 

* from After A Death, —Tomas Tranströmer

 

 

MARGO BERDESHEVSKY, born in New York city, often lives and writes in Paris. Her latest poetry collection, “Before The Drought,” is from Glass Lyre Press. In an early version, it was finalist for the National Poetry Series. A new poetry collection, “It Is Still Beautiful To Hear The Heart Beat” is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. A hybrid book, “Kneel Said the Night” waits at the gate. Berdeshevsky is author as well of “Between Soul & Stone,” and “But a Passage in Wilderness,” (Sheep Meadow Press.) Her book of illustrated stories, “Beautiful Soon Enough,” received the first Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Award for Fiction Collective Two (University of Alabama Press.) Other honors include the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her works appear in Poetry International, New Letters, Kenyon Review, Plume, The Collagist, Tupelo Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Southern Humanities Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, The American Journal of Poetry, Jacar—One, Mānoa, Pirene’s Fountain, Big Other, Dark matter: Women Witnessing, among many others. In Europe and the UK her works have been seen in The Poetry Review, PN Review, The Wolf, Europe, Siècle 21, Confluences Poétiques, Recours au Poème, Levure Littéraire, Under the Radar. She may be found reading from her books in London, Paris, New York City, Los Angeles, Honolulu, at literary festivals, and/or somewhere new in the world. Her “Letters from Paris” have appeared for many years in Poetry International online. Here is one: https://www.poetryinternationalonline.com/letter-from-paris-in-march-2019-from-margo-berdeshevsky/  For more information, kindly see here : http://margoberdeshevsky.com