Issue 29 | Fall 2023

How to Keep Going

Rebecca Macijeski

Let me tell you again. A new day is a new world is a new mind. There are a few constants: cerebral cortex, Irish breakfast tea, the way window light makes wavering star maps across the too-tired skin of my hands. The rest changes. The howl of a morning when it opens. The observation itself—sometimes laser-focused, sometimes dull and inattentive. The room swells. Or the room darkens. Or the room does nothing, but the heat of my own imagining tumbles out of me like movie theater popcorn. All that appetite and butter. You see a mostly average, mostly harmless gathering of elbows and bones, legs, all the middle bits, a face I try to dress up now and then. What you don’t see are the empty spaces my mind does everything it can to fill. The spaces neurons make on the Vegas strip of my brain, the marrow, the colonies of cells that grow my liver and stomach, the rest of yesterday’s lunch. Yes. Those things are there. So are the metaphors that keep me alive, the shorthand they make of every pain, every lost friend, every memorial wreath thrown in a small town river. They live in me even as they die. Archived, but impossible to catalog. I don’t know how many drawers there are now, how many are filled with meals or pints or long walks into various dusks in various other worlds. Let me tell you again. A new day is a new one is a new one is another, another, another,

About the Author

Rebecca Macijeski 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.