Rebecca Macijeski is a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Nebraska, and holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She currently serves as an Assistant Editor in Poetry for Hunger Mountain and Prairie Schooner. Some of her recent work has been featured as part of the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project, and she is a recipient of a 2012 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. She has attended artist residencies with The Ragdale Foundation and Art Farm Nebraska. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poet Lore, Potomac Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Rappahannock Review, Nimrod, Gargoyle, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Sycamore Review, Storyscape, and others.



September 7, 2016

Rebecca Macijeski

When I was Six My Mother Set Out Sleeping Bags in a Blue Plastic Pool in the Yard So We Could Watch the Lights in the Sky

I dream of being that wonderfully small again, against summer, fireflies, the steady buzz of crickets. My body tight in fleece next to my sister, the two of us safe in the kiddie pool's cupped hand, and the excited pointing at the faraway bigness of meteors burning their names in the sky.

This poem came out of wanting to honor as an adult the joy I felt in my childhood backyard. I view the moments I experienced there with a kind of marvelousness; each memory builds the collected mythology that becomes my life. That may seem like a hyperbole, but my imagination was born in afternoons in that yard. Being out among the trees and blackberries and grasshoppers taught me about the interplay of big and small, of myself in a larger context, of the quiet power that comes with maintaining a sense of awe over who and how we are in the world.

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published weekly by Glass Poetry Press.
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