This selection, chosen by guest editor L.M. Cole, is from Autobiography by Rebecca Macijeski (Split Rock Press 2022).
newspaper
My brain refuses
to believe
what it reads
about itself
in the newspaper.
Newspapers are dying.
Reading is dying.
The brain’s like a goldfish now.
Attention is dying.
My brain waking in the morning
is a revolution. I’ll say it.
It lives with me in my head
when I sleep or pee, or take a shower,
sear steaks in a pan, or
watch twelve talking heads
trying to become president in my living room.
My brain travels
with its own podium
—this rest of me it drags
underneath throughout the day.
I take it to work, the grocery store,
I lay it down on the couch when it’s tired.
I feed it whatever’s left in the fridge.
My brain swears she was born first.
She tells the story this way.
Before our body there was the idea
of what we might become. That was me.
I lived in that potential like a bird
in an egg. It was all I could do
to wait for you to catch up with me.
Every bit of you was wobbly or slack.
Then, like an aging relative,
she stares into the distance
and smiles. Like she’s finally found
an answer. Like I’m finally listening.
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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