Synkroniciti is thrilled to welcome back poet and writer Jennifer Maloney from New York state with two mesmerizing poems strong in nature imagery. The prose poem “Coyote,” one of our “Haunting” poetry contest finalists, is memoir fused with monster myth and natural phenomenon, recognizing humans contain a predatory wildness: “a thrumming inside you, a vibration like nothing so much as the pounding let-down of the new mother’s breast. Something singing, calling the coyotes. It wriggles under your uniform—a patch of fur bursts from between buttons, a glimmering fang from your gums—keep hold of it, stuff it down.” The pressure of watching loved ones and family die of disease and of being seen as vermin by those in power makes “normal people” even more like the coyotes which take refuge in modern American cities. We are becoming more and more desperate, more haunted, more hunted. Evoking the werewolf, Jennifer makes us think about what we are capable of. Do we want to espouse this energy? Is it the only way to respond to a brutal world?
“Hat” is a memorial to a missing love: “I keep thinking, maybe/ I can catch/ the thoughts/ that swam beneath its crown, net them/ when they bubble to the surface—/ like friendly koi in search of treats,/ his hat, the lure.” Jennifer shows us how absence haunts us and how one person’s life creates ripples and displacement in the lives of those who love them, even after separation. “I left my job/ to look for him,/ and couldn’t pay the rent. So,/ tell him I’m at the shelter, ok?” By the end of the poem, we are not sure if he is alive or dead, but we know the depth of the narrator’s affection and her frustrated desire to know his thoughts, which are “alien but interested. Friendly./ Like koi.”
Read “Coyote” and “Hat” in Synkroniciti’s “Haunting” issue, Vol. 6, No. 4, available 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.