Poetry By Malinda Meadows

Colby Stopa CC




Intergalactic Stars Were The Talk of The ‘90s

Rogue stars, or lost stars, in our home 
small mouths unable to say intergalactic.
Hubble’s searching eye finds the Virgo Cluster:
a group of wandering stars, shining 300,000 
lightyears from the nearest galaxy,
and one Friday night around the cracked tiles
of the kitchen table, feet brushing tired 
floorboards, we turned up the volume and wondered
                                              Where did they come from?
                                              Where do they belong?
On Saturday mornings, we clean up hypocrisies.
Spent bingo cards, discarded pull tabs,
cigarettes twisted into frustration and left 
in the church hall, the love of money 
is the root of all evil so claims the Bible, yet 
when the same church spares you 
from bag searches, metal detectors, 
police presence, pays your hefty tuition 
but disputes the Big Bang--
                                              you learn the only noise to make
                                              is with a dustpan.
How hard it must be to leave, to imagine
grand distances, though scientists do say 
it’s easier to leave the gravitational pull 
of small galaxies than larger ones, 
and if stars gain hypervelocity, 
if they time it right, play it right,
the momentum alone will expel them 
out of their home, away from
check-cashing joints    fluorescent lights   no sidewalks
toward someplace with polished Mary Janes
skirts and hair of a certain length
codes of conduct conducting new futures,
and I want to know, are these stars lonely, 
stuck between galaxies, lightyears apart,
                                                             or are they free?





Only This Morning


Only this morning, in 1960s Paris, Annie Erneaux confided 
in me the intimacy of her abortion. I reach for the newspaper: 
writers, poets, artists will lose their jobs to AI, the article says. 
I speak briefly with a friend about the sunlight in his old 
apartment, his dog Slim, but afraid we’ll start counting 
the ghosts between us, I hang up. Every few hours, I jump 
at the sound of gunshots. Remind myself again that these 
are blanks, meant only to frighten the crows. I find a web 
where one spider has encased another. Afterward, I feel the need 
to hang something beautiful in its place. (Or was that beautiful?) 
I take my niece to the beach to collect shells and, delighted 
she says, look, it’s just like the video game, and I want to correct her
say no, no — this is real life, but then a dark shadow of birds,
afraid or unafraid, fleeing or free, swim across the sky, and 
well, who am I to say?



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Malinda Meadows is a poet from Columbus, Ohio, currently living in Cork, Ireland. She co-founded the Late Night Diners, a dynamic, all-women, multigenerational poets' collective, with the first anthology releasing in April 2024 with an 8-women collaborative poetry performance. She was recently published in the inaugural issue of the Four Faced Liar and performed her piece at the publication launch.

She’s cultivated her writing in workshops with esteemed poets such as Paul Casey (University College Cork), Stephen Sexton (Stinging Fly), and Patrick Holloway (University College Cork) and published articles on food, grief, community, travel, patient care, and more through various outlets.