Jennifer Maloney
Pieces
We break up. We break camp, pack our various cans and bottles, wrap the garbage, open the mouths of the trunks of our cars and feed back in each bite we had removed. We fill the bodies of our conveyances with what our lives have broken into, and the cars seem satisfied, especially when we pack ourselves in as well—the car lighting up, purring. Beginning its next journey.
Break down. Like a body, unhooking itself from itself, parts moving apart, some carried off by wolves and foxes, eyes and tongues plucked into the beaks of crows. What is stringy and tough begins to melt. Insects colonize it, make it an apartment house they can also eat, like the witch’s gingerbread walls and candy roof, all the sweet and the savory packing into bellies that need and rumble and want, until they stop, and they, too, become someone else’s food.
Break out—of this prison of bones, or beliefs, or circumstances. Step back and see the steps you’re dancing. Pull off your dancing shoes—break the laces, gray and fraying, and place your naked sole against the earth. Everything beneath your heel is moving: growing, living, dying, dancing, and the grass you’ve crushed smells like a summer you remember when you were young, kneeling on the sidewalk, half an earthworm broken and wriggling between your flat palms. A mystery, a sadness, the way everything breaks becoming clearer every day.
Erasing the Compass
Under the sun, all details erase. My fingers twine, the light between them, diffuse, glowing through the thin skin that divides them, through my eyelids, pulse and pressure. In my grandmother’s car, red leather, black dash, my hands between me and the sun. At the top of her windshield the glass turns green. Deepens. An egg-shaped compass floats and wobbles on the dashboard.
My grandmother, driving us to Star Market, Mother simmering in the seat next to her. Grandma’s cigarette wedged at the ashtray’s edge, pink lip-print trembling like it might cry. My mother’s cigarette ribboning smoke out her window, her white plastic cat’s eye sunglasses winging up in perpetual dismay, their lenses green as the top of the windshield, a red paisley kerchief knotted beneath her chin rippling in the breeze and nobody’s talking. Two sets of bow-shaped lips, one pink, one red, one pointed staunchly toward the road, one twisted towards the window, sipping smoke, fuming.
At the grocery store Grandma will pull up in the fire lane. My mother will slam out, fling open my door, yank me from the red leather into which I’ve been trying to shrink, to burrow, grab my upper arm and pull me out onto the pavement, hip-shut the car door and drag me away, tossing we’ll walk home over her shoulder at Grandma, who won’t hear, already pulling out in a screech of burnt rubber and hurt feelings. I’ll stumble along in my mother’s grip, past glass globes filled with pastel jawbreakers, SweetTarts and mouse turds, my arm bruising beneath her fingers, the sun unable to erase those shadows.
The cart bites my thighs, pinch and scratch. I want to stand on the back and ride like the big kids, but she won’t let me. Squirm, wiggle, try not to cry, bite the inside of my lip to stop it, but my face is still something she can police and she slaps it. Quit it! A hiss under her breath. Don’t you dare embarrass me, but now I can’t stop, I can’t, the sun is in my eyes again, glowing, stinging, erasing every barrier.
Finally, she lifts me out. Fine, get down, she sneers, but it’s sure gonna be a long walk home, Sunshine. I don’t care because the grocery store is cool, green as celery, yellow as bananas, there are big, pillowy letters hanging on the walls that I can’t read but red and blue balloons mean Wonder Bread, my nails scratch paths in the milk carton’s wax, and the eggs in their baby blue Styrofoam beds remind me of the compass in Grandma’s car. I like the compass, but it tattles. It tells on us and how we go, like pink lips in a knotted bow.
Jennifer Maloney writes poetry and fiction; find her work in Synkroniciti Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic Magazine, Flash Boulevard and many other publications. She is the author of Evidence of Fire, Poems and Stories (Clare Songbirds Publishing, 2023) and Don't Let God Know You are Singing, Poems and Stories (Before Your Quiet Eyes Publishing, 2024). Jennifer is a parent, a partner, and a very lucky friend, and she is grateful, for all of it, every day.
