Issue 29 | Fall 2023

How to Lose Your Fear of Death

Rebecca Macijeski

Perhaps I’ll eat everything. Perhaps I eat everything and the hunger remains. What then? What more can I put in my body put in my mind put in my heart before next thing I know I’ll want the whole town on a bed of lettuce, my family tree deep fried. These hands cannot hold it all. They’re covered in syrup, gravy, jam, food truck salsa. Last year the census took a count of all the unwashed plates in my kitchen. Spoiler: there’s enough for a new congressional district. I don’t know if there’s a solution. It’s not really about burritos or pierogi or ice cream, after all. At the end of the day, when I’m alone with the wild dark that always comes, I’m desperate to fill a hole I cannot name. Aren’t we all? I don’t believe you. I barely believe myself. Belief is temperamental, shaky, a soufflé about to fall, the dual moons your headlights make on a winding road. I’m afraid some nights I’m all I’ll ever know. Would you like to stay for dinner?

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.