Four Poems | Jennifer Maloney

Celebration

Lost all night, a familiar city,

houses that I know I know—

black powder, bone-ash,

green-smoke, sweet smoke—

home.

My father finds me.

His brain is addled—

he wants to bring me

to my dead grandmother—

he thinks that she’ll know

where to find us,

and will come find us,

if I’ll just call her,

Why won’t you call her?

Because Celebration’s wobbling

on the rail that guards the gully,

and I’m holding tight

to the waistband of her jeans—

but her arms are wings,

and joy propels her,

fall or flight.

She’s a girl I know, but never met.

Sting of cinnamon,

slingshot comets,

horizon to horizon eyes,

dark-soaked sky, fizz and crack

of cans of beer, and here—

what already could be written no more*:

the wet slap of night-thick air,

low jazz buzzing in my hips,

how lips sip salt

from the skin of summer,

and the birds decide

when we sing,

when we sleep—

my father has evaporated.

Wandered off

to find that burning house of bones,

but I am home with Celebration,

as she pops another cream ale top.

Exploding wonder of her mouth

on mine, achieving lift-off

from the dead-end sign.

*from Jacques Dupin

Red

It’s the end of the world,

and I’m watching it all

on the big-screen in the living room

while I eat my dinner. The big-screen is flat

and bright and it explodes each night

between 6 and 7, but that’s because

I’m old-fashioned, I like a routine,

I like my chaos served in half-hour slices,

like a dynamite sandwich

squeezed between slabs

of thick, white suburbanites,

fat-assing their way through the mystery

of who’s-the-babydaddy

and influencers with eating disorders

hawking navel oil and body dysmorphia.

It goes down easier in small bites, small,

like a pillowcase used to bear

something the size of a doll.

I swallow slices of flesh—

on my plate, on the screen—

one at a time, chew them like cud,

in mouthfuls much smaller

than the crater could swallow—

the pit where the camp once stood—

the hole like a jaw hanging broken,

toothy with rubble and glass.

A giant maw that ate it all:

little stores and big buildings,

mosques, churches, temples,

the boys and the girls,

the wrong and the right,

drank it up, sucked it down,

like a drunk uncle on the fourth of July,

swilling and spouting,

my country right or wrong,

my country love it or leave it,

my country tis of thee,

of the blue and the white and the red,

red as my throat,

red as my tongue,

red as the stains on a small pillowcase

carrying something the size of a doll,

not heavy at all,

but tiny and still

and silent and red

as my still-eating mouth.

My mouth,

that says nothing.

Nothing at all.

Missing

Like a drunk, the world has got the spins.

A fourth-floor room in a grimy hotel,

the world clings like a tick

to an inch-thick mattress, dopesick,

puking, trying not to slide right off itself,

watching stars explode like punches

in a Batman universe—

bam! Pow! Kaboom!—

until finally it passes out, a small reprieve

before the sun starts harassing it again,

banging the world’s head,

demanding a mouth

for its golden cock.

Round and round we go.

I don’t want to talk about war anymore.

What else is there to say?

My adjectives are tired.

They’d like to be left alone for a while,

undisturbed by mines and missiles

delivering a payload of religion

down the throats of office buildings,

hospitals, apartments,

that fall to their knees in the street,

like penitents, or whores,

their skirts of steel and concrete,

sweep away the passersby,

(and their objections

to conversion),

while mosques, churches, temples

explode like ecstatics in the air,

whirl like dervishes, Sufi mystics,

then drop prostrate in the dust,

the blood that seeps

from their shattered bodies

an offering

to a new and jealous god.

I dreamed I saw my children murdered.

Soldiers buried them in a cave outside of town.

But when I tried to find their bodies,

they were gone,

and no one seemed to understand me.

In dreams,

my friend tells me,

we are everything, and everything

is us.

Maybe it’s me that’s missing,

presumed dead.

Maybe it’s the world,

hiding out in a west-side SRO,

faking its own death

out of sheer weariness.

They say the hardest part

is the not knowing.

The hardest part

is hope, because

what if they survived?

Crawled

from beneath the rubble—

a miracle,

but bleeding out—

what if they’re alive,

but still needing to be saved?

What if there is still time?

What if we could help them?

What if they are crying,

and their mothers never come?

The Day and I

Words slide up my leg like a silk slip. Like the hand beneath the slip that drifts to my collarbone, plays love notes on my neck like a piano, percussive. I shiver. Wake up falling. Try to stand but darkness slams me against the wall. My eyes tick, tick, tick like a second hand. The word is nystagmus. The word is concussion. The word is vertigo. There are white spaces between words, places to rest, as though I could rest. Pull them apart, they unravel like an old sweater, the daylight between them illuminates nothing. The day stands in the doorway, uncertain, eyes stumbling from face to face. Someone sighs. No one speaks. My eyes swing like a pendulum as the day wrings its hands—I am dizzy, falling backwards between the car’s front seats, you and the day holding me, kissing me, fingers purpling words into my throat, I am floating, wondering if I like them, knowing that I do, these words like bruise, like busted, like broken, like I’m six again on Galena Street where the door is a window and it must be the sun that blinds me, trips me, shoves me right through, I feel its hot, hard hand against my back. I fall into the day, into its arms, spilling a message on the front step. The doctor says stitches. My mother says clumsy. The day and I don’t say a word.

Jennifer Maloney writes poetry and fiction. Find her work in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, SHIFT: A Publication of MTSU Write, ImageOutWrite, Volumes 7 & 8, Litro Magazine and many other literary magazines and journals. Jennifer is the author of the hybrid chapbook Evidence of Fire, Poems & Stories (Clare Songbirds Publishing, 2023) and Don't Let God Know You are Singing, Poems and Stories (Before Your Quiet Eyes Publishing, 2024), a full-length hybrid collection. Jennifer is a parent, a partner, and a very lucky friend, and she is grateful, for all of it, every day.