Feather Brained by Jennifer Maloney
In “Feather Brained,” Jennifer Maloney uses poetic prose and abstraction to blur the lines between dreams, reality and memory. In her author’s note, she writes: “One way I keep myself safe when I write is to insist that the piece is fiction. Poetry.” “Feather Brained” begins with a writer dreaming of writing. Her attempt is interrupted by an accuser—her mother—and begs the questions: Can we create while accosted with doubt? Is what we remember real? Who are the truth keepers? Are writers the truth keepers? In Maloney’s flash, the structure changes, much in the same way that we might change when we are gaslit; the prose abstraction momentarily settles into the sureness of verse, and then bounces back into prose just as the writer wakes. It’s as if she has decided what the truth is. It’s as if she has known it all along. —CRAFT
I’m just sitting down to write when my mother descends out of a Winston-blue cloud, nosy-necked, squinting. Her head glints with bobby pins, skinned-tight and sectioned, mapped out like a city block, an argument for redlining, a gerrymander, aspirational, the way things ought to be. Her face is peeled clean as an egg, but her cowbird father who left her in the nest, long gone, is an over boiled yolk, tainting her, yellowing her to jaundice under shiny white skin, maybe even browning her, an idea that grinds like gravel in her guts. She’s stuck wearing her mother’s naked face everywhere beneath her shaggy black hair and eyes, but she keeps her eyebrows incised, her beak sucked and withering.
She tosses a scrap of carrion in the air to see if I’ll bite, lofts you’re a liar at me but I duck and take only a splattering. She regurgitates we did the best we could with you kids but I dodge that too, tucking and rolling behind my father who has metaphored into garden statuary, ornamental, with eyes that refuse to follow as they should. They find the horizon and lock on, a marble cherub, stone-deaf, thousand-yard stare.
My mother’s house coat flaps, becomes the wings of a giant bird, a hawk, a falcon. She rises, wingspan martyred, and hangs above us just below the cloud ceiling, rasping boo hoo, you told your dead aunt lies about me, she crawled out of the grave last night and wormed into my auriculae and now you’re in big trouble
Big trouble! parrots Dad and I startle, a caught sparrow, fluster, flutter, my father immediately lapsing back into catatonia
but my body has betrayed me, my ribcage now talons ribboning flesh, their grip crushing the air from my lungs till I gasp, gasp—
my husband rolls over in bed—
and I wake up not writing. Sleep-writing,
my mother’s bird costume flying away, revealed as a semi-inflated Mylar balloon bobbing in midair, thermals pushing it gently, silver-crimped edges scritch-scritching the walls. Mother tries to screech but it comes out a hiss of stale helium, tries to stamp a foot but it’s limp, just a dragging string. Happy birthday! shrieks the balloon like a harpy, like it didn’t just try to kill me. I’m sixty-two again, Mom and Dad nested somewhere in the wilds of western suburbia, my mother forever perched on my father’s stony shoulder, a vulture longing to be a bird of prey.
JENNIFER MALONEY writes poetry and fiction. Find her work in Ninth Letter, Many Nice Donkeys, Synkroniciti Magazine and many other publications. Recent chapbooks include Maps of a World (Raw Earth Ink, 2025) and Red (Clare Songbirds Publishing, forthcoming 2026). Jennifer is a parent, a partner, and a very lucky friend, and she is grateful, for all of it, every day.
Featured image by Julian Hanslmaier, courtesy of Unsplash.
