Two Graves, One Terrible Date by Jonathan Everitt

Site of Disappearance by Erin Malone
Ornithopter Press
78 pages

Even memories buried for decades are not dead—only sleeping. For poet Erin Malone, Sunday, September 21, 1983, represents profound loss. That’s the day her brother, Michael, died following surgery to treat a congenital disease. But it also connotes a terror that engulfed her hometown of Bellevue, Nebraska. September 21, 1983, was also the date the body of 13-year-old Danny Joe Eberle was found, three days after he disappeared while on his newspaper route in Bellevue. He’d been abducted and murdered.

“Everything I’m afraid of / I’m about to name.” writes Malone in Site of Disappearance (Ornithopter Press, 2023). And with that, she conjures the details surrounding that long-buried day with exquisite clarity and emotion. She reconstructs memories that have resurfaced as she’s watched her own son grow into late boyhood, and the reader watches as they become clearer with each page.

Malone’s second poetry collection, Site of Disappearance (with its haunting cover art by Ryan Molenkamp) touches on so many things that disappear. A brother. A paper boy. A season. Innocence. Security. Memory. The opening poem, “Biography,” centers her brother in a story where a townful of people will also figure. But even in this centering, the poet foreshadows other, darker images to come: “my brother was born blue / and quiet / not unlike the sky and like the sky he lived / exposed” and “he lived / for eleven years he lived / and then /”. There are clearly other sites of disappearance soon to be named.

Many of the book’s poems contain rich imagery that suggest faded snapshots or grainy home movies pulled from a 1970s shoebox—a period when Malone and her brother would have been young children. “Under the tree / a paper plate // abandoned // moon” imagines debris from a picnic in the poem “Training Exercise.” And this simple visual catalog from “Overlay”: “We moved away. I lost / a backyard fort plus / the coffee can with my treasures / —leaf in shale, geode, bones / of field mice kindling.”

“Overlay” is also a key moment in the collection because it is here that the poet explores the death of the two boys in closest proximity. “Eberle was found on the day my / brother died. Their obituaries / two adjacent doors, their bodies / alongside each other in the town / cemetery.”

As the collection progresses, the poet’s reckoning with the past comes into sharper focus as she mines the archive of her own memory. With its shocking opener, “Time Capsule” conveys an entire community’s destabilization: “After the murders, children / in the town dream of houses // melting into the sky.” and “fear riddled its hive inside us.”

The poem “Basement” portrays a burial place for things yet to be contended with. It’s confession is spoken like a chant: “Shadow, / shadow // The soul’s oldest room.” Here again, an image does the work of conveying a recaptured memory, with “Two tiny swings— / one green bird, one blue. // Because I was afraid / they’d escape, / they never flew.”

Section IV of the collection is a significant departure in form from the more orderly free verse sections. Its fragmented lines—often just a word or two—are engulfed in white space and half-empty brackets like a mind awakening to a blurry nightmare. “Mothers forgive me for opening / these wounds,” Malone writes in Section IV, perhaps including herself in this plea. There is work that must be done.

As the reader nears the end of Section IV and moves into the collection’s conclusion, the poet speaks in the present as the mother of a boy. In the poem “Filament” she writes, “Now ask him, who restored me / to wonder: // Remember?— // His long hair flicks / across his eyes.”

There’s little more to say about a book that begins with death and ends with life. Simply put, Site of Disappearance is a striking and memorable work of art I will return to many times.

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Erin Malone is also the author of Hover (Tebot Bach, 2015), and a chapbook, What Sound Does It Make (Concrete Wolf, 2008). Born in New Mexico and raised in Nebraska and Colorado, she earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Washington, where she won an Academy of American Poet’s Prize. Her poems have appeared in FIELD, New Ohio Review, Salamander, Cimarron, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. A former editor of Poetry Northwest, Erin teaches occasionally and works as a bookseller. She lives on Bainbridge Island, WA.

James Bogue, photographer

Jonathan Everitt is a poet and freelance writer based in Rochester, N.Y.