Rebecca Macijeski

The Photograph I Didn’t Take, at Sixteen, when I Saw a Street Performer in Rome
Smoking on
His Lunch Break, No Longer the Statue of Liberty

Like me, I suppose,
he was green from head to toe.

He sat on the edge of the fountain,
the metallic folds of his fabric
lilting in the breeze.

He removed his crown
and sat it next to him.
Underneath was the plain island of his scalp,
the only bit of him not a costume.

I watched him at a distance,
the other 16-yr-olds lost
in kiosks and caricatures.

I could not stop looking.

The perfect arc of his arm, the wisp of a cigarette
at the end of it, the marble cherubs spitting
and pissing their little splashes behind him.

I wanted to know how we got here,
together, in this afternoon.

Like any young girl, lost and landlocked,
naïve to her own ignorance,
I made a story for him.

He’ll go home to cook a perfect fish on a little stove,
or dream of being a boy again in first snow.
The next morning he’ll pick up his torch and tablet
again, settle his crown atop his head, make the city
his stage.

A week later when I was back home in a small room
in a small house in a small town
I could not stop being sad.

I thought my sadness made me more real,
like I could use it to love my Velveteen heart alive.

I could not stop looking, even across the ocean,

at the statue man, the long light, the fountain,
how the other girls seemed to bloom under Italian sun
while I became stranger and quieter to myself,
something to perform, a shadow I could not come to know.

***

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Rebecca Macijeski is the author of Autobiography (Split Rock Press) and Apocryphal Girl (Pinhole Poetry). 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.