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Rebecca Macijeski
How to Be Adrift
First you need an ocean in your mind. Or a lake. A gentle river. A harbor. Any slow water your body knows. Then put a boat there. A wide boat. A calm boat. A simple one. Climb in the boat. You get to decide if it’s a canoe or a jet ski, a raft, a yacht, or a schooner. If there’s a helm, it’s yours. Good. Next is the sky and its keen paradox—always with you and always also an untravelable distance at the end of your stare. People around you back home in reality will see you, but they won’t know where you are. This is part of the plan. When they speak, the sounds emitting from their oceanless heads will be seagulls, messages in bottles, a lighthouse’s droning horn. You’re gone now. Floating. Why haven’t I come here before, you think. You take in what the water gives you and you are grateful. Maybe salt. Maybe river mud. Maybe frogs croaking into the night, that other distance you reach for but never reach. It doesn’t matter. So long as it’s yours, it doesn’t matter. This ocean, this lake, this still harbor you can return to. So long as it’s yours.
Rebecca Macijeski is the author of Apocryphal Girl (2024) and Autobiography (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. Website: rebeccamacijeski.com.
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