Jenny Maaketo | Epistle to the Fallen Nestling

Jenny Maaketo (she/her) is a neurodivergent writer, psychiatric nurse, and former professional actress from Austin, Texas. She is currently an MFA poetry candidate at the University of Mississippi, as well as the managing editor for Yalobusha Review. Jenny was a finalist for The Fiddlehead's 2025 Ralph Gustafson Prize and the 2024 New Letters Editor's Choice Award. She has received support from The Community of Writers and The Longleaf Writers Conference. Read her poems in swamp pink, Post Road Magazine, Pembroke Magazine, Heavy Feather Review, Amsterdam Review, Midway Journal, Cherry Tree, and The Florida Review. In her spare time, Jenny loves to binge Antiques Roadshow, fold modular origami, and color coordinate her closet. She lives in rural Mississippi with her husband, two children, two dogs, two cats, and a mess of love.

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Also by Jenny Maaketo: When Echolalia Becomes a World in the Mouth of my Son Aubade to the Weight of a Soul in the Morning Air Partum Zuihitsu

July 29, 2026

Jenny Maaketo

Epistle to the Fallen Nestling

My husband promised you were not an omen. The day before Rhet’s birth, all mouth gaped open, you cried blind-born for Mother’s hearth and meal. I laddered up, recloched you, but — repealed by Mother Thrasher’s swoop — you fell again. Then prey to cold and open stone chilblain, you lay like lace, a morsel for remorse. What kind of mother eats her young? Divorces weaker kin from kin? My pulse so haunted by tourniquet words like: Dad, he never wanted you. The vein Mom can’t unsay. Forgive me — my never-fledge, your soul so ortive — before the light of sun and birth renamed me Mother — you fostered me from breast to halo-wing.