One of these is true.All the animals were making love. It was the day for it. All the otheranimals but a wolf hid, listening to the slide trombone of his ownbreath. Who lay in a dim room, quiet but for the simmerof breaths of the lovers outside. It was their day. There was no lock on theroom. Only a belief that he was meant to lie in the silence. Breathe in thedim. Not meant to question. No howling. Noquestions. He slept, warmed by the high fever of his belief.Once upon a time there were bodies strewn and none to gather them. Itwas a massacre. That’s why we remember the day. Death had shot andshot and gotten away with it. That’s what survivorssaid. Warmed by the high fever of their beliefIt was one single arrow of passion, and Eros was good with it. A winner.Whom it struck—loved and was loved in return. Until it hurt the heart.No questions were allowed. The poison of love was aperfect killer. Everyone wanted to taste the poison. Warmed by the highfever of their belief.Once upon a time there was a peaceful body born who loved everyoneand everything on earth and in the air. No one had taught her. She wouldlie down in silence on a road or a field to stop bullets orsouls. She believed in the power of her thought. If warriors came withflags and swords and bombs and God on their side—stop! said her nakedwoman body, paused in the path of their attacks. She’s onfire, observers saw. And loving her, stop! said the covens of owls, stop,said a murder of crows, stop, said eyes from branches to the east,branches to the west. Stop, said the hawk who loved wars. Stopmurmured the dove who knew the hawk very well. And her naked bodywhispered, God does not love warriors. A whisper that pierced theirhearts that wanted to be loved by their own God. There,whispered the woman, looking to a sky she believed she saw . . . do youknow what to do now, God? Warmed by the high fever of her belief.One of these is true. Or almost. A gift from the winter.
From the Winter of…
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Copyright © 2019 by Margo Berdeshevsky
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Margo Berdeshevsky was born in New York city, often lives and writes now in Paris. Her latest poetry collection, Before The Drought, is from Glass Lyre Press, (2017.) (In an early version, it was finalist for the National Poetry Series.) 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, 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.
A hybrid book, Square Black Key and a new poetry collection, It Is Still Beautiful To Hear The Heart Beat wait at the gate.
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” may be found in Poetry International, here.
For more information, kindly see here: http://margoberdeshevsky.com
Summer 2019
Lincoln, Nebraska
University of Nebraska
Editor-in-Chief
Timothy Schaffert
Managing Editor;
Jessica Poli
Prairie Schooner, an international literary magazine, publishes poetry, short fiction, and essays from around the world. In recent years, the quarterly has included authors from six of the seven continents (with subscribers in just as many). Historically, it is one of the nation’s five oldest quarterlies and will celebrate its centennial with the Spring 2027 issue. A project of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln English Department since its debut in 1927, Prairie Schooner is one of UNL’s most important cultural exports and research legacies. Not only has it published some of modern literature’s most notable writers, but it has also provided opportunities for generations of students to gain first-hand editorial experience.
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