Mind-too-full-ness by Judy Kronenfeld

Mind-too-full-ness

With every fragment of my one precious,
dwindling life, I am trying to focus
on these strawberries I bought for breakfast
as I wash them—enormous berries,
that look as if they’ve been given hormones,
like steers and heifers, and a little too crisp
on my knife, I notice, as I quarter them
into a bowl—unlike the miniscule
and profoundly sweet wild ones I would like
to find in a hilltop patch in some idyllic future—
berries that would stain my hands as I stuff them,
three after two in my mouth, whose juices
would dribble down my chin.

I drag my attention, kicking, back to the present,
marvel at the multitude of strawberry
seeds on each piece—tiny slightly quizzical
eyebrows all over the red flesh—which lead me
away to nature’s contingency plans,
her overcompensation for bad odds:
the leathery pomegranate pouch packed
with hundreds of arils bejeweled in glistening,
delicious ruby pulp; frogs that produce thousand-egg
clouds; fish that release millions at one go.
And oh! the hundred little turtle hatchlings
I watched on a video last week. Cheered
by onlookers, they clambered out of the nest,
then flippered laboriously over mountains
and valleys of sand to the sea, where maybe
one in a thousand (on a good day) or one
in ten thousand (on a bad) won’t be scooped up
by a barracuda or plucked by a gull.

I’m trying to tug my eyes back
to the cheerful strawberries in their white bowl,
trying to haul myself with gratitude back
to the warmth of my kitchen, back to my right arm—
almost healed from a fracture months ago—
actually lifting the bowl, back to your brightening
eyes as I set the berries on our breakfast table
next to the buttered toast.

But, love, I can’t not see the ruined world—
how it empties of deliciousness, brightness
and warmth, how it fills with the sounds
of annihilation by enormous bombs, dulls
to the uniform grey of destroyed cities,
how irrevocably it numbs the starving and stunned,
sitting on the mutilated ground hunched
over their fires—trying to bake a little
ashen bread with the last of the flour.

*

Judy Kronenfeld’s full-length books of poetry include Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), and Shimmer (WordTech, 2012). Her poems have appeared in four dozen anthologies and widely in journals. Her eighth collection, a chapbook of poems, If Only There Were Stations of the Air, will be published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in early 2024, and her ninth, another chapbook, Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements!, will be released by Bamboo Dart Press in June, 2024. Her memoir-in-essays, Apartness, is forthcoming from Inlandia Books in 2024/2025. Judy is Lecturer Emerita, Creative Writing Department, UC Riverside.