Synkroniciti is happy to welcome back poet and writer Jennifer Maloney of Rochester, NY, with two engrossing poems for our “Dreams” theme.
The prose poem “Australia” is a wild, spidery dream exploring her childhood home, which “Straddles the border, a DMZ, No Man’s Land. I have to take my chances there. Step in—kitchen left, dining room right, and I have no business in the dining room, even less in the cellar whose door opens directly ahead. In the kitchen, the Hotpoint, round and white and stacked atop itself, a chrome-smiled snowman.” In the way of dreams, the locale is familiar and yet alien, twisted and amplified. Kitchen appliances and the television take on surreal personalities. This is a world where her sister wields a sparkler, performing some ominous binding spell, and her brother is absent, in “a different world of boys and bicycles.” Everything is filled with a sense of anticipation, as if the scene could crack open at any moment. It’s one of those PTSD dreams the mind pulls up to work through past trauma. The richness of imagery and deep vulnerability are hallmarks of Jennifer’s work and she uses them deftly to create in us a burning curiosity tempered by a longing for escape.
“The Nature of Its Dreams” is a surreal meditation on the nature of Time itself and what will appear when reality breaks down. “I wonder if, one morning, Time/ will wake up,/ yawn like a cat,/ and turn over in bed?” Envisioning Father Time as Burt Reynolds circa 1972, sleeping in the buff, wrapped in the blanket of the universe, Jennifer postulates that we do not know the nature of that which waits on the other side. Existence may be a capricious experiment or even something more sinister, especially if we judge it by what we experience on this side. She does all this in delightfully madcap and irreverent way that is a guilty pleasure.
Read Jennifer’s colorful and surreal poetry in Synkroniciti’s “Dreams” issue, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Jennifer Maloney writes poetry, plays and short fiction. Find her work in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Litro Magazine, Literally Stories and Synkroniciti. Jennifer is the author of the hybrid chapbook Evidence of Fire, Poems & Stories (Clare Songbirds Publishing, 2023), and the full-length hybrid collection Don’t Let God Know You are Singing (Before Your Quiet Eyes Publishing, 2024), and she is grateful, for all of it, every day.