Synkroniciti is happy to welcome back writer and poet Jennifer Maloney of New York, who has won our poetry contest twice (Wild, Audacity) and our flash fiction contest in Vulnerable. I love watching artists evolve, especially when they surprise me with a new side of their talent. In Expectations she shows her range.
In “Get Real,” Jennifer captures the uncanny moment when a character refuses to behave as expected. Any writer who has felt a plot buckle under a character’s will recognizes this sensation: we think we’re crafting a narrative, but often we’re excavating one. The story dramatizes that shift beautifully.
“The prompt says, give your character a gift, so I place a wrapped box on her front stoop, ring the bell and run, a kind of reverse ding-dong-ditch, leaving a pretty present rather than a flaming bag of poop. I scuttle across the street and leap the neighbor’s prickly hedge to hide and watch.
Her mother opens the door. That was unexpected—I didn’t know she lived with her mother. I wonder what else I don’t know?”
Our narrator gives her character curiosity, ingenuity, even naïveté—gifts meant to propel her forward into the plot. But she uses them to step sideways, away from her creator’s intention. The unopened package becomes a symbol of her independence: she chooses not to play along. She chooses not to be predictable. She chooses herself.
This is the electric heart of the piece: the moment a fictional being becomes real, not through love, as the Skin Horse teaches in the epigraph, but through choice. It’s a sly, exhilarating inversion of The Velveteen Rabbit.
The poem “Good Housekeeping” explores the poet’s mother’s unfailing ability to keep house. This didn’t translate into supportive mothering–she was seldom present for her children, emotionally or physically–but the house was spotless.
Jennifer’s imagery is electric, hinting at the pathology behind her mother’s cleaning, which reads like a cross between addiction and religion with a side of kink.
“the gasp/ of the vacuum, elongated, strangled,/ stroking the carpet erect/ as the hair on the nape of a neck./ A spritz of lemon sparked at pulse points—/ mirrors and windows.”
Her mother’s devotion to order replaces the tenderness she cannot or will not give.
The poem’s sonic texture, created through alliteration and assonance, keeps the piece from sinking into despair. Instead, it vibrates with tension, a rhythmic charge that mirrors the compulsive energy of the mother herself.
These two pieces touch on motherhood and agency, but from very different angles. One piece celebrates the moment a character becomes real by resisting her creator. The other reveals how a mother becomes unreal—absent, unreachable—through obsessive devotion to perfection.
The contrast is striking, and it makes the pairing unusually rich.
Read Jennifer’s mesmerizing work in Synkroniciti’s Expectations, Vol. 8, No. 2, 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.
Such wonderful words, Katherine. I appreciate your kindness immensely.