Berdeshevsky, St. Joan, her sky ... its feral, cobalt voice

I have billed the reading variously:  3 Great Women!  /  Paris ... New York ... Seattle  /  Berdeshevsky ... Sarai ... Stangeland / The Babes.

No, I haven't, in fact, used the babes.  But my desire to entice prospective audience members to come to the Cornelia Street Cafe, 29 Cornelia St., Greenwich Village, on Monday, March 12 at 6 p.m. to hear see and in ways seemly and metaphysical enjoy three fleshpots of Jerusalem---no, wait---three poets, each of whom is solidly and surely implanted in her body--is strong.

I admit to some concern and much worry. I live here. For me there'll always be another day, while for Margo Berdeshevsky, a New York reading requires a flight across the Atlantic Ocean (my least favorite of oceans). For Joannie what's necessary is flight over the United States (my most favorite landmass).  But it is a great distance. Distances, in these instances, are vast, majestic and terrifying as a demand.

I posted two poems by Joannie Stangeland earlier in the week.  Here's Margo. [And thanks to the poet Angelo Verga who works triage on poetry readings at the Cornelia St. Cafe.]

Blackouts

Out of a sense of purity: blackout.
No other voice of any other
(God.)
No other voice
comes to her tiny garden.
No rain
but stinging nettles,
and no other soul but hers, parched.
On the footpath, a blue cypress, unhurt.
Tall as a July sun, reaching.
Its own opal halo flung wide on the landscape.
Wild and bruised.
Blackout.
~
Bruises on the damp nature.
Far from the sound of the lure.
What was it she promised when she was an imaginative child
whispering hard at her own low window, mouth to that low
opening—was it to love? to be better than any sword?
curled at her air-slit in between the house-stones
no higher than her two hands—window no larger than
her face, burning?
There—  her sky—  there—  her sky—  its feral, cobalt voice,
and sun that tasted of young honey.
A girl called Joan who would ask a thousand times—
"To shut me out from the light of the sky?"
Who thought a nation
could be ordained.
Cypress. Crepuscule. Lamb. Blackout.
No other voice, a thousand times.
Like bees.
                                   (for Joan of Lorraine, her sky.) 
______
Margo Berdeshevsky