Why We Needed Iceland

Rebecca Macijeski 

When we got married my gift to you

was crossing an ocean and climbing a glacier.

We traveled the country all day by bus

to put spikes on our feet

and cramp them down in the ice with each step

as if to say look how strong and bold we are.

Look how we shatter what used to form on our hearts.

Look how the volcano with its hot ash turned cool

settles in the distance beyond us,

watching as we lean into a stream

and drink the fresh melt of the world.

And the ash gathered behind us in dark pyramids

marking where we’d been. One wrong step

and we would have fallen down the ice’s thin slice

toward the earth’s rumble, our bodies

slipping back to geologic time.

Even today your I love you comes like this—both

a surprise and a glacial promise—like this whole time

we’ve been riding the world toward each other,

and have only now begun to arrive.

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, 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. Her poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, Poet Lore, Barrow Street, Nimrod, The Journal, Sycamore Review, Potomac Review, Storyscape, Fairy Tale Review, Puerto del Sol, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Gargoyle, and many others. Rebecca is Creative Writing Program Coordinator and Assistant Professor at Northwestern State University. Visit her online at www.rebeccamacijeski.com.