#BLauthor18: Jessica Maybury

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#BLauthor18 is Jessica Maybury.

Jessica Maybury is an Irish fiction and poetry writer who lives in Turnhout, Belgium. She reviews comic books at Girls Like Comics and regular books at The Rumpus. In 2011 she co-founded ESC zine, a literary and visual art journal, and is still in love with it.

Always a pleasure to publish writers who are into reviewing and promoting other writers, but also reviewing comics? Too cool.

Check out a new poem by Maybury, with commentary by co-editor Quinn Fairfeldt, and stay tuned for one more new BL author in 2014!


In Hindsight I Wish I'd Gone For A Storm Swim in Lake Michigan

The rain in America is hot,
and large,
and foreign.
We swam up through it,
creatures bred in wetter climes, slamming
the door to the room on the fourth floor of a hotel
in which we would live the latter part of our holiday
on a street I cannot name, in Chicago.

And you, lovely, silhouetted by the freak white glare
of the hurricane outside. In a room half-walled
by windows,
I had you close the curtains, and you stood in a
slipstream of light
while I, lovely, I
hid in our bed [which seemed bigger than ever],
telling myself that
there were monsters in heaven.

Co-ed Quinn Fairfeldt on “In Hindsight…”: In this poem, the reader is treated to a poem about relationships, but one that sheds all pretense and cliche at the door. Maybury speaks fluently the language of partnership and familiarity, and how fear and foreign-surroundings can strengthen the bond between two people for a brief time when the only known quantity is the person who is experiencing the same anxiety as yourself. Thrust into an unforgiving storm during a time in which the subject is meant to be enjoying a holiday, there is little option but to weather the “freak white glare/of the hurricane outside.” Stuck together with no escape or outlet, Maybury lays bare an intimate moment of reflection in which two people are linked by circumstance. However, despite this shared experience, which is often thought to strengthen bonds, Maybury ends the poem on a note of loneliness, with the subject floating alone in a bed as a ship on the sea, reflecting that “there were monsters in heaven.”  In the end, the reader is left adrift as well, wondering whether this poem serves as a reflection of two people looking back on a shared past, or if it is the lonely reminiscence of the subject, retelling the tale to no one at all.