This selection, chosen by guest editor L.M. Cole, is from Autobiography by Rebecca Macijeski (Split Rock Press 2022).
palindrome
My brain is a palindrome,
an ouroboros, a circle,
a loop of alternating current.
You can see the neon and filaments
all lit up like a small-town Christmas
or an amber alert or a stadium scoreboard.
Or maybe it’s more like
the Pangea of a clown head
in a lite brite long lost to an attic corner
with baby shoes and photographs of weddings.
If there’s no one there to arrange
the colorful bulbs two pinched fingers and a thumb at a time,
then what happens to this metropolis of light?
I imagine each thought
coming online like streetlamps
over a highway. That whooshing sound
of thinking and cars. My brain is a clover leaf,
a roundabout, an airport terminal abuzz in its own blinking.
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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