Autobiography

My brain is a birdhouse
up on one stilt
at the edge of the lawn.
It’s got an alpine sloping roof
and little filigrees all along the sides.
Sparrows and chickadees come stay awhile
like thoughts, and let melodic talking
bubble out of them.
Their beaks are tiny megaphones.

The birds know their way back each spring
by their ancestors’ rhythms of song and flight.
The thoughts make their own magnetism, too,
imagining how many of themselves they can thread
through the little opening at the perch.
Sometimes it’s orderly and measured
like a parade. Other times it’s a mob
of rustling, bundles of feathers that fill and flare
like balloons, like lungs, an expanding universe.

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, and as an Assistant Editor in Poetry for the literary journals Prairie Schooner and Hunger Mountain. Her poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, Poet Lore, Barrow Street, Nimrod, The Journal, Sycamore Review, Fairy Tale Review, Puerto del Sol, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Conduit, Gargoyle, and many others. Rebecca is Creative Writing Program Coordinator and Assistant Professor at Northwestern State University.