Because I Am Not Some Bland, Studied Thing Called “The Self”

Iridescent circle held by a thumb and pointer finger. — “Theory of Sacred Mirrors” by Aaron Lelito

I am the mind that fills the room,
the body that loves you, this energy that thrums
with the same life that puts green on trees.
I am some larger thing that grows.
I am someone talking,
but not nearly as much as someone listening.
When I breathe
what comes out is a song of air
that’s been around since the beginning of earth stuff
and even before
and next it wants to go to sleep in your body,
search the pink rooms of your lungs.
I keep expanding what I am.
The brain inside me is wider than anything.
Like myself, like the word itself,
I am built of unsteady paradoxes.
I am for you and for no one.
I am alive as anything.
I am what my mother and father made
when they left their homes to build a new one
and all this imagination tumbled out of them.
I am what wakes up in me every day,
and the movies that reel and reel when I sleep,
the proud miracle of those pictures dancing.
I am loud. I am strong. I am loud even
when I make no sound. I am all these ideas, all these things.
I am a body that wakes into the doom or the glory of every day.
I am this right now breathing,
all these little puffs scrambling out my nose
—that weird little front door.

Rebecca Macijeski 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, and as an Assistant Editor in Poetry for the literary journals Prairie Schooner and Hunger Mountain. Her poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, Poet Lore, Barrow Street, Nimrod, The Journal, Sycamore Review, Fairy Tale Review, Puerto del Sol, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Conduit, Gargoyle, and many others. Rebecca is Creative Writing Program Coordinator and Assistant Professor at Northwestern State University. Visit her online at www.rebeccamacijeski.com.