After

By Rebecca Macijeski

For Sophie Scholl, with a line by Philip Memmer

Sophie Scholl (1921-1943), a German student and anti-Nazi activist, was executed by guillotine after she was witnessed dropping leaflets from the top floor inside a main building at Ludwig Maximillian University.

Sonchus oleraceus by j arlecchino

What about the body, this old suitcase,

touch magnet, lazy bones, soft bleeder,

bruised apple, tired old war horse?

What if we were as simple as paper dolls inside

folding and folding, little tabs clinging to what we know?

Soft, smooth, purposed. We could become cranes.

We could become term papers, leaflets, wedding invitations,

lanterns, white roses, a tickertape parade, streaming

far away from the bodies

we used to nest inside.

Each generation shedding another autumn

to the forest floor.

Think of us this way.

Think of us as

pages and pages

coming home.

---

Rebecca Macijeski is the author of the chapbooks Autobiography (Split Rock Press) and Apocryphal Girl (Pinhole Poetry). 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. 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. Read more at https://www.rebeccamacijeski.com/.