“What We Build” likens governmental abuse of power to the cruelty of an abusive spouse, violence lurking beneath the façade of civic order. Jennifer frames American history as a Cubist painting—fractured, unresolved, and impossible to flatten into a single, tidy narrative. Propaganda thrives on closure; history does not. The poem reminds us that understanding alone cannot heal, and that we cannot hold a nation together by denying the dissonant, contradictory truths that underlie society.
Her second poem, “Ghosts,” turns its gaze toward the creative life itself. Though centered on the poet’s experience, its reach extends to all artists working in a post‑truth America governed by spectral forces that see no value in human expression.
“So don’t fool yourself, pal. Go ahead and climb in the bucket with your friends and all your words, your wounds. The ghost that runs this town stuffed the money for the garbage trucks down his invisible pants. You and your friends and your poetry ain’t going nowhere. There’s piles of you on the street to rummage through—see if you can put enough of that junk together to sell to some tourist, get a bite to eat tonight.”
Here, the artist becomes a kind of urban busker, hawking work to passersby who treat lived experience and imaginative labor as disposable. The poem’s imagery, creatives rummaging through their own “junk” to assemble something saleable, lays bare the indignities of an economy that treats art as refuse unless it can be monetized.
Together, these poems deliver a damning portrait of our current social order. They pulse with a visceral, muscular agitation, refusing to let us look away from what is being lost: public art, collective memory, creative livelihood, the belief that expression has value, and humanity itself. Jennifer Maloney writes with the kind of audacity this moment demands—clear‑eyed, unflinching, and full of fire.
Read Jennifer’s enlightening poetry in Synkroniciti’s “Audacity” issue, Vol. 8, No. 1, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Jennifer Maloney is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. She writes poetry and fiction; her work is available or forthcoming in Flash Boulevard, Many Nice Donkeys, Ninth Letter and Synkroniciti Magazine. Recent chapbooks include Maps of a World (Raw Earth Ink, 2025) and Red (Clare Songbirds Publishing, forthcoming). Jennifer is a parent, a partner, and a very lucky friend, and she is grateful, for all of it, every day.