This selection, chosen by guest editor L.M. Cole, is from Autobiography by Rebecca Macijeski (Split Rock Press 2022).
i talk to my brain
I talk to my brain
the way fire eats through a forest,
the way birds trumpet over a parking lot,
the way water is water whether in clouds
or cocktails or the ocean, the way warm chocolate
pools in your mouth like a tiny flood, the way
bricks climb each other to build a wall,
the way traffic lights always remember
their circling story of red to yellow to green,
the way one day it’s Thursday and all of a sudden
you’re in a different life a thousand miles away,
the way your childhood is so long ago now
it feels like a movie you saw once
that you can’t quite remember or believe,
the way music—though it’s made of nothing—
can see that part of you you thought you’d hidden
where no one could go
and soon you’re singing
or crying or changing your life.
That’s why we keep talking.
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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