Theories of Water

1 Minute Read Time

In the right light my mind recalls its own wildness cascading into fresh view.
The wildness of damp East German rain, slugs big as fingers clinging to 
      the street.
In the Rorschachs of mold blooming across my curtains in Japan.
In the country stream piloting its own froth 
down the mountains and out to sea.
In the pond I fill under the Christmas tree
and the steadiness it carries up through branches 
holding onto angels and felt mittens, tassels,
painted houses framing the neighborhood of my hands. 
In the morning shower listening along my body,
water gathering stories of where I’ve been in sleep.
In the memory of schoolgirls walking home under rain,
the steady wet pulling rainbows from the markers in our book bags 
all down our oblivious legs. In that first-grade winter cold
when we smooshed in our snowsuits to the ball field
and skated the cool slick that surprised itself overnight across the diamond. 
In how we awed there at the clean potential of snow,
a world of water dosed out in armies of little stars.

Rebecca Macijeski

is a poet, editor, and educator. She is the author of Apocryphal Girl (Pinhole Poetry, 2024) and Autobiography (Split Rock Press, 2022).

She holds a PhD in English with a focus in creative writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and a BA in English and Music from Simmons College (now Simmons University). She has attended artist residencies with The Ragdale Foundation, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and Art Farm Nebraska. She’s worked for Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry newspaper column, worked as an Assistant Editor in Poetry for the literary journals Prairie Schooner and Hunger Mountain, and is the recipient of a 2012 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. In 2016 she attended the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching at Robert Frost’s former home in Franconia, NH. She has also offered collaborative workshops at the National Association for Poetry Therapy Conference in Kansas City and Denver. Her chapbook and full-length poetry manuscripts have placed in contests with Comstock Review, Four Way Books, and YesYes Books. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Nominee, her poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, Conduit, Poet Lore, Barrow Street, Nimrod, The Journal, Sycamore Review, Fairy Tale Review, Puerto del Sol, and many others. She is an Associate Professor and Coordinator of Creative Writing Programs at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. She has lived in Louisiana since 2017.

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