Synkroniciti is proud to welcome back New York poet and writer Jennifer Maloney, who first debuted in our “Wild” issue, taking the top prize in poetry. We also awarded her our flash prize in “Vulnerable.” “Identity” features a short prose/flash/memoir piece and a poem.
“Secret Lives of Small Things” begins by acknowledging all of those items that go missing in our daily lives and the fear, even terror, that we feel at their sudden absence. Jennifer asserts that these missing and mislaid objects must be having more fun than we are.
“Unmatched gloves wave to each other. Keys jingle, laughing. A billion pens and pencils dance, leaving an unintelligible scrawl on the void’s floor. Scraps of paper covered with phone numbers and passwords talk to each other in the language of numbers: butt dialing, logging into websites and learning about Gobeckli Tepe, dinosaurs, the poetry of Roethke and Rilke. They send prank texts, giggling, and refuse to reveal themselves. All this, while I hyperventilate. Lost, without them.”
Jennifer does not stop here. The humor opens us up for a sudden, disarming twist. She draws a connection to her young self daydreaming under a rack at Sibley’s department store while her mother frantically called and searched for her. It’s captivating imagery, seeing herself as a thing among lost things. She imbues the inanimate with life and diminishes her humanness.
The poem, “Unchanged,” one of our “Identity” poetry contest finalists, describes an outing of a young girl with her father searching for cicada skins. As she listens to the nightbirds, she talks ominously of her own song and poetry: “like a story I once heard,/ that said my soul, all souls, are birds—/ things made of magic—/ if I open my mouth,/ the bird flies out.” The marvelous use of repetition and assonance ratchet up dramatic tension as the girl decides not to unburden her story here, but remain “safe and whole,” unlike the cicadas. The price for this is that she and her father remain hidden, thus remaining “monsters.” There is a wrongness here which never comes to the surface but hints that the relationship between father and daughter is not healthy or natural. This girl needs to shed her skin and cannot do so at this time or in this poem.
Read Jennifer’s captivating poetry in Synkroniciti’s “Identity” 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.