Waiting for My Medicine
In the pharmacy a man sits down across from me,
dragging a long green tube of oxygen
on little wheels; it looks like a torpedo on one of those
collapsible shopping carts or luggage carriers.
He’s got transparent tubing stapling
his nostrils, like the fangs of a snake,
but, as if leaning over a fence, nattering,
he strikes up a conversation with another customer.
He’s not out of breath. He laughs. He jokes.
I want him to stay like that, talking unthroatily,
his long still young legs blazing in front of him,
to prove that things aren’t always
how they seem. But he hears his name.
He shuffles to the pharmacist’s window,
takes out his wallet, shakes his head.
“Costs a hell of a lot to die,” he says.
*
Judy Kronenfeld’s six full-length books of poetry include If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024), Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), and Shimmer (WordTech, 2012). Her third chapbook is Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! (Bamboo Dart, 2024). Judy’s poems have appeared in four dozen anthologies and in such journals as Cider Press Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, One, ONE ART, Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Verdad. Her newest book is Apartness: A Memoir in Essays and Poems (Inlandia Institute, 2025). Judy is Lecturer Emerita, Department of Creative Writing, UC Riverside. In another life, she produced scholarship on her English Renaissance loves, George Herbert, John Donne, and Shakespeare, including King Lear and the Naked Truth: Rethinking the Language of Religion and Resistance (Duke UP, 1998).
