What if
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.
I make a map
each time I learn a place,
each time I know
its rhythms of traffic and birds
and sun between barns
and neon food shops.
Rebecca Macijeski holds a PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has attended artist residencies with The Ragdale Foundation, The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and Art Farm Nebraska. She has also worked for Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry newspaper column, as an Assistant Editor in Poetry for the literary journals Prairie Schooner and Hunger Mountain, and is the recipient of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Nominee, her poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, Poet Lore, Barrow Street, Nimrod, The Journal, Sycamore Review, The Cincinnati Review, Puerto del Sol, and many others. Rebecca is Creative Writing Program Coordinator and Assistant Professor at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. Her chapbook, Autobiography, is forthcoming from Split Rock Press in 2022. Twitter @RMacijeski
