This selection, chosen by guest editor L.M. Cole, is from Autobiography by Rebecca Macijeski (Split Rock Press 2022).
cartography
My brain is a cartography.
I could tell you a story.
I could name names,
show you histories,
point to all the culprits.
I could do that.
I have those lists.
But what if instead
I remembered
the way light held on
to the river rocks
three blocks from my house
or how geese
my last autumn in Nebraska
gathered and settled
like ritual
in a cold field.
I could follow the rivers
where I grew up
the way a child’s drawing
follows the lightning
in that early mind.
Suddenly a map appears.
Suddenly a world.
As fresh and impending
as the pre-dawn sky.
This happens
each time I learn a place,
each time I know
its rhythms of traffic and birds,
sun between barns,
neon food shops.
I catch my reflection
in a store window,
never sure what I’ll see
but something stays familiar
even in Boston or Osaka
or Vienna or Chicago,
like the rough language
of my face
is the key to reading
the inner country
I bring with me
wherever I go.
Rebecca Macijeski is an Associate Professor and Coordinator of Creative Writing Programs at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. She holds a PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and a BA in English and Music from Simmons College (now Simmons University). She’s worked for Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry newspaper column, worked as an Assistant Editor in Poetry for Prairie Schooner and Hunger Mountain, and is the recipient of a 2012 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Nominee, her poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, Conduit, Poet Lore, Barrow Street, Nimrod, The Journal, Sycamore Review, Fairy Tale Review, Puerto del Sol, and many others.
L.M. Cole is a poet and artist residing in North Carolina. She is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Bulb Culture Collective whose writing and art have been published with The Pinch Journal, The McNeese Review, Five South, The Dodge, and many other excellent journals and magazines. She can be found on Twitter @_scoops__ and more of her work can be found at linktr.ee/lmcole
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