by Rebecca Macijeski
You don’t need to invent a wild.
You are a wild.
Self Portrait as Snowfall
You can’t rush me.
I’ll take my time.
Unlike you, I’m born
over and over again
in the sky.
My cloud origin gives me
a closeness to our beginning
that you will never know.
If I speak too much
in enigmas, it is because
my life is not as full and loud
as your life. I bring
quiet wherever I go.
I bring the metaphors you give me, too.
I’m sugar. I’m white
I’m powder. I’m clean.
I’m these blankets that enslumber the trees.
At night in the cold after I’m finished falling,
you put footsteps in me, make angels,
roll facsimile bodies, round families
you stack in cairns. It’s not enough for you
to be here with me.
You insist on evidence.
You insist on saying what you keep inside
so you can see yourself written plain on the world
like a demand, like a declaration of war.
It’s why you explode things on the fourth of July.
It’s why you catch pieces of me on your tongue.
You are so scared of being alone.
The Trees Are on Your Side
You try not to become Cinderella
or Snow White or Gretel
or any other trope girls
with promises in their throats instead of voices.
The stories that form in your mind
are like what nature forms
—real, with branches and vines.
You don’t need to invent a wild.
You are a wild.
When the world wants you pretty and quiet,
make friends with forest things.
Red maples and beech trees.
Birds glimmering, unspoken, between leaves.
Become, the way soil does, part of
what feeds the growing world.
Feel your toes and fingers into what we all come from
—this earth that buries us and celebrates us.
In your story, the wild you know is the wild you are,
is the wild you become.
In your story, you get to run.
The Girl as Oracle
Bring offerings.
Bring candy, nuts, small cakes.
Bring what you can’t afford to give.
Throw coins into the well.
Throw salt over your shoulder.
Believe everything you read
about stars and moons.
Spill your tea leaves’ obscure pictographs.
Leave bowls of rice.
Leave fortunes.
Leave strings of beads.
Leave the names of the dead.
Watch for first blood.
Watch everything change.
Light incense at the altar.
Watch the trails of smoke
close the distance
between what you burn
and what you become.
© Rebecca Macijeski
Rebecca Macijeski (she/her) is the author of Autobiography (Split Rock Press, 2022). She 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 an Associate Professor and Coordinator of Creative Writing Programs at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana.
Find her on rebeccamacijeski.com.
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