Tag: Judy Kronenfeld

Two Poems by Judy Kronenfeld

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“Senior Living”

Sometimes it seems like a Dantean limbo
of the walking dead—the bent at 90 degrees,
the shaking whose forks trip on the way
to their lips, the halt who shuffle tortoise-pace,
and those whose maladies escape
naming—the tongue rolled upwards
spasmodically filling a mouth,
like pink porridge in a pot
rising over and over to a boil.

Sometimes it feels like
the theater of redemption.

Here, in the crepuscular hour,
where skin gathers
on the face in crepey folds,
hair withers like leaves
revealing bareness underneath,
I rush to carry a new friend’s
laden plate from the buffet
while she Rollators back to our table;
I offer her my water
when the waiter’s late.
Here HELLO! follows Hi!
Everyone greets unknown others
in the halls—like bonded passengers
in the same relentless boat, traversing
the pitch-dark river.

*

Moment, Registered

On a stark strange-to-us
persistently clouded day
in our new still alien
senior home we don’t yet
call home, my husband,
with his sieve memory, and I—
bundled in the “winter clothes”
once kept at the back of our closets
“back home in California”—
hold gloved hands for a short walk.

Just ahead of us on the path,
a chubby gray squirrel
velvet-white of chest sprints
down a brown grassy hill and leaps
into a bare tree, balancing
on a jiggling twig-thin branch.
We both watch, but only I file.

Then the round bundle bounds up
into the air again, springing
from one bouncing spindly limb
to another, as if for the sheer green
glee of it—like a kid on a trampoline—
and my husband claps his hands.

Joy! For the present-minded,
even among the beasts.
If not in my heart
just yet.

*

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 (Jacar Press), 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).

Waiting for My Medicine by Judy Kronenfeld

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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).

ONE ART’s June 2025 Reading

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We’re pleased to announce ONE ART’s June 2025 Reading!

Featured Poets: Barbara Crooker, Robbi Nester, Judy Kronenfeld, Cathleen Cohen


>>> Tickets Available <<< (Free! Donations appreciated.)

The reading will be held on Sunday, June 8 at 2pm Eastern.

The official event is expected to run approximately 2-hours.

After the reading, please consider sticking around for Q&A with Featured Poets & Community Time (general conversation).


About Our Featured Poets:

Cathleen Cohen was the 2019 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, PA. A poet, painter and teacher, she created the We the Poets program for children (www.theartwell.org.) Her poems appear in literary journals and in books: Camera Obscura (2017), Etching the Ghost (2021) and Sparks and Disperses (2021). Her artwork is on view at Cerulean Arts Gallery (www.ceruleanarts.com) and www.cathleencohenart.com. Cathleen blogs about ekphrasis (http://www.madpoetssociety.com/blog. Recently, one of her poems was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Judy Kronenfeld’s nine collections of poetry include If Only There Were Stations of the Air  (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2024), Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), Shimmer (WordTech, 2012), and Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! (Bamboo Dart, 2024). Apartness: A Memoir in Essays and Poems was published by the Inlandia Institute in February, 2025.

Robbi Nester is a retired college educator who has never stopped teaching in one way or another. She is the author of 5 collections of poetry, the most recent being About to Disappear, an ekphrastic collection that will be published by Shanti Arts. She has also edited 3 anthologies and curates and hosts two monthly poetry readings on Zoom, Verse-Virtual Monthly Reading and Words With You, part of The Poetry Salon Online. Learn more about her work at http://www.robbinester.net.

Barbara Crooker is author of twelve chapbooks and ten full-length books of poetry, including Some Glad Morning, Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Poetry Press, longlisted for the Julie Suk award from Jacar Press, The Book of Kells, which won the Best Poetry Book of 2019 Award from Poetry by the Sea, and Slow Wreckage (Grayson Books, 2024). Her other awards include: Grammy Spoken Word Finalist, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council fellowships in literature. Her work appears in literary journals and anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature.
www.barbaracrooker.com

>>> Tickets Available <<< (Free! Donations appreciated.)

When You’ve Lived in a House for Fifty Years by Judy Kronenfeld

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When You’ve Lived in a House for Fifty Years

it breathes with you in your sleep;
it lights your lucky way
from morning bed to kitchen
of blessings–the filled
pantry, the humming fridge
committed to keeping the berries
you love for breakfast
firm and delicious.

It lets you move freely through
its pleasant rooms, as you water your
peace lilies and philodendrons,
and after a slightly scary check-up
at the doctor’s, and some fill-in shopping,
welcomes you again for dinner
and a little non-alarming TV, watched
with your spouse from the soft settee.
It vouchsafes both of you
a quiet passage to untroubled dreams,
guarded as it is by ancestors
assembled in multiple albums
in its cabinets, pressed
against each other in phalanxes.

You want to pray to this house’s
lares and penates. You want to
beg them to never let you
leave it, never make you sort
the dust-encrusted plastic bins
entrusted with hundreds of letters
you and your husband wrote to each other
in an almost mythical past.
You want to entreat the household gods
to keep them forever reachable
and uncorrupted on their sagging shelf
in the garage of inexhaustible mysteries.

*

Judy Kronenfeld is the author of nine collections of poetry. Her six full-length books 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), Shimmer (WordTech, 2012), and Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, 2nd edition (Antrim House, 2012)—winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize. Her third chapbook, Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! was recently released by Bamboo Dart Press. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Cider Press Review, Cimarron Review, DMQ Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, Offcourse, One (Jacar Press), ONE ART, Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig, Slant, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verdad, and Your Daily Poem and four dozen of them have appeared in anthologies. She is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and has also been nominated for Best of the Net. Judy has also published criticism, including King Lear and the Naked Truth (Duke, 1998), short stories, and creative nonfiction. Her memoir-in-essays, Apartness, will be published by Inlandia Books in 2025. She is Lecturer Emerita, Creative Writing Department, University of California, Riverside.

Mind-too-full-ness by Judy Kronenfeld

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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.

The Dream by Judy Kronenfeld

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The Dream

For eons, we cannot talk, my brother, my sister.
I am one of them to you; you are one of them to me.
And we each know—knives held between our teeth—
how murderous the other is, or wants to be.
Our stories calcify in isolation, yours a holy shrine
visited only by your people, mine a holy shrine,
visited only by mine.

But then, as ages pass like clouds
in time-lapse video, something you say,
my sister, my brother, pierces my armor.
A small, surprising chink has already appeared
in yours, like the sun startling at dawn
on the Summer Solstice, behind the Heel Stone
at Stonehenge.

For many generations more, we live
with the inconvenience of incomplete
defenses. And now comes the point when
the dream wants desperately to pull
the rabbit of hope out of the black
hat of horror. But the dreamers
say to the dream There is no magic. Or, How arrogant!
You cannot possibly know my lived experience.

Still, the dream keeps beginning, dreaming itself,
fantasizing. One night, when I am dreaming,
one of my people names her first-born son
with two names, one in my language,
one in yours. One night, when you are dreaming,
one of your people names his first-born daughter
with two names, one in his language, one in mine.
Let us imagine Ezra Bassam, let us imagine Hanan Ahava—
each child born with an imaginary sibling,
a brother, or sister bound to him or her, with whom
each freely walks on the land they love,
practicing, practicing…

*

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 memoir-in-essays, Apartness, is forthcoming from Inlandia Books in 2024/2025. 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. Judy is Lecturer Emerita, Creative Writing Department, UC Riverside.

Sometimes there’s no freedom to love the world— by Judy Kronenfeld

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Sometimes there’s no freedom to love the world—

its slants of light,
its glancingness
requiring quick
open arms.

The sorrows of the body
hood your eyes.

Time places its heavy
stones steadily around
you—building, building—
until there is only
a small spot left
for your body
to curl into itself,
its own prisoner
in its cold hovel

where it dreams
of galloping through the dark
like a hero in a ballad,
drinking in the flash
and glint of dawn.

*

Judy Kronenfeld’s fifth full-length book of poetry, and seventh collection, Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022) came out in 2022. Previous books include Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017) and Shimmer (WordTech, 2012). Her poems have appeared in four dozen anthologies and in such journals as Cider Press Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Verdad. Her memoir-in-essays, Apartness, is forthcoming from Inlandia Books in 2024/2025.

Going Outside by Judy Kronenfeld

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Going Outside
           —Southern California, April 19, 2022, 10 A.M.

Oh, close star, how gorgeous
on this breeze-cool morning
is your light—everything
rustling, turning in it, like a bird
fluttering in a bath, throwing off
sparks. Thankfulness rises in me
for being laved in such magnificence,
and not living like a fish
in an inky cave, useless eyes
forever disabled—until I think:
How can I know what
it is like to swim, eyeless,
in the tranquil blue,
around and around
as the water makes
little lapping sounds
against cave walls?
And I’m happy just
to be alive in this sun,
without comparison.

*

Judy Kronenfeld’s fifth book of poetry, Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle) came out in February, 2022. Previous collections include Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017) and Shimmer (WordTech, 2012). Her poems have appeared in over three dozen anthologies and in such journals as Cider Press Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, Offcourse, One, Rattle, Slant, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verdad, and Your Daily Poem. Judy is Lecturer Emerita, Department of Creative Writing, UC Riverside, and an Associate Editor of Poemeleon. She lives in Riverside, California.