This selection, chosen by guest editor L.M. Cole, is from Autobiography by Rebecca Macijeski (Split Rock Press 2022).
paper cup telephone
My brain is a paper cup telephone
connected by string to the neighbor’s house.
I am a child speaking big and small secrets in
for safe keeping. I tell it my height and weight
in case my body is lost. I say all my favorite words,
so it will hold forever the sound of my voice holding them.
I won’t tell you them now. You might give them away.
The paper cup in my hand is a trumpet,
a music box, a metaphor. It becomes a beautiful ear.
When I talk into it, it’s like I’ve climbed inside.
I imagine my words building up, gathering charge,
then shooting their lightning across the string
to whoever’s on the other side. An elephant?
A God? Some other perpetual motion machine?
What I’m saying is I’m still here,
sending storm after storm.
Like the one summer as a child
when I would bring my mother
glasses of water she didn’t ask for.
I think I was taking care of where I came from.
That same summer I learned about fireflies.
They appeared in the yard like distance,
like humming. Singly, then in whole strings
along the night. I learned how to follow them,
to move quietly, to bring my hands home around one
and become a lantern.
The story I’m telling you
is the story of becoming what I am.
When I whisper in the paper cup
then hold it to my ear,
I’m reading the sky again for fireflies.
I’m listening for the flash.
I’m becoming the light—my hands yellow-gold against the dark.
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
