Judy Kronenfeld’s sixth full-length book of poetry is If Only There Were Stations of the Air  (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2024), and her third chapbook is Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements (Bamboo Dart, 2024). Her poems have appeared in such journals as Cider Press Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, One Art, Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Verdad. Judy has also published criticism, including King Lear and the Naked Truth (Duke, 1998), short stories, and creative nonfiction. Her memoir-in-essays-and-poems, Apartness, is forthcoming in 2025 from Inlandia Books. She lives in Riverside, California, with her anthropologist husband. 

Unimaginable

Though I recall that moment [of his baby’s death]with

absolute crushing clarity, it is still unimaginable to me. 

—Alexsandar Hemon, “A Tale of Two Daughters”

 

Just out of “successful” 

surgery on the hip she broke

after her second stroke, my mother

asked for a comb and a mirror

and said, for the thousandth time,

“I look like a prune”—

 

unlike the faceless,

the deformed, the knowingly terminally

ill, the body-debasing, who have learned, 

or been forced, to think of themselves

as souls. Death was not yet 

close as her coat, wasn’t

sleeping with her, lived

in another country, reachable only

by an arduous, and as yet unplanned

journey.

                                                

And that’s when we can

imagine it—isn’t it?—whether it’s ours,

or even—God help us—a child’s. Mahler said

he couldn’t have written

the Kindertotenlieder after his child

had died, though he’d imagined his child

had died, in order to write. But before,

just a touch Romantic, isn’t it,

à la Père Lachaise—the caped 

and draped figures, streaked with corroded

tears, the small child head rolled back 

in final grimace, held aloft

in the angel’s arms—                                                   

 

My mother might have                                               

imagined triumphant vindication à la

Ann Landers—“Guilty and Heartbroken

Daughter” writes “Now my mother is gone

and I’m racked with remorse.”                                               

But I wasn’t. 

I did what I could.

I brought the comb and mirror.                                   

I put them away. I sat by the bed.                                           

I held the fingers that dripped over

its side, and she whispered

“my angel” as she slid. 

 

My lucky mother

put down the mirror, clucking. 

No slow striptease of the mortal, no 

death mask, no practice coffin, no hot

death breath prickling the back 

of her neck. She said to oblivion

Not me! and to us: “God doesn’t

want me yet.” And the next

day: mugger death in the dark alley—

one quick rap to the back of the head. 

——–

Originally published in Innisfree Poetry Journal

In the Doctor’s Office, Two Weeks before His Death

 

What was my father dreaming,

hunched in his wheelchair,

zipped neck-high in too warm fleece,

tired eyelids gently closed,

fingers meekly interlaced

in soggy lap?

 

Even his waking

was a kind of dreaming. As if he had become

a dream self that he watched—a self so

patient and he unable

to shake him, so silent,

and he unable to make him speak.

 

And he waited—always in

the moment’s blink—without knowing

he was waiting, as now

he waited to be summoned

by the doctor’s nurse, to glide

to the examining room (myself

anonymous behind), the rain

of stimuli erased as if by

windshield wipers, then again erased,

again, again, again.

 

His brain was ratcheting

crazily backwards until it spun

blindly off its sprockets; it was

a print left too long in the developer

until it became all blackness.

 

But suddenly he smiled with such 

sunburst graciousness—what was

he dreaming?— and murmured so 

distinctly in his sleep, “That looks

so nice!,”  as if his soul leapt

to an instant of shining reassembly,

like broken glass in a film run

in reverse.   

 

——–

Originally published in Cimarron Review

The Withering of Their State

 

And all that believed were together,

and had all things common.

—Acts 2: 44

 

In the end they lose all

their chains and ghost and swirl

by each other in the closed

bubble of the “reminiscence”

wing like flakes of snow

in an upended souvenir globe.

 

In the end they wander in

the deserts of each other’s

synonymous small rooms, 

their possessions winnowed

like so much chaff in a chill

breeze, sold by

beleaguered daughters, parted 

to Goodwill—the leavings squeezed

in with the new twin bed: one table,

one uneasy chair, the old TV

they have forgotten how to turn on.

 

And in the end no-one among them

lacks, for if one sits shivering

on the toilet, where the attendant

has deposited him, dreaming and

losing a dream of dry warmth

like a distant bell, the groaning wardrobe

of his roommate may yet open unto him.

 

And in the end the scales fall

from their eyes, and they fall asleep

in each other’s chairs, and thine

is mine, and now is then, and mildly,

with the most gracious of oh?s,

they allow themselves to be

removed, guided away by their pliant

elbows, by those who still live

in the bordered world. 

 

——–

Originally published in The Women’s Review of Books

Grief-Shock

 

You think time should flood,

or swerve, or dry up,

but time—like the metronome clicking

while the poor music  student struggles—

does nothing unusual

at all. At this millisecond

when you think this rock dropped

in time’s river will break

its arrow, the instant is already sliding 

downstream like a froth

of bubbles vanishing in after

and after and after, though you lie at the spot

on the shore—stranded

and despoiled, like a homestead

through which an army has stomped

to the beat of trumpets and drums. 

 

——–

Originally published in Avatar Review

Saving the Dead

 

Our memory is the only help that is left to them.

—Theodor Adorno

 

We carry them inside us like persons

still unborn, as if everything they might be again

awaited them. The bodies of our mothers

before we were born: the once coquettish

bodies of our prim mothers—my mother balanced

on a honeymoon hayrick with my father,

his palm sweeping her face towards his

for a kiss, a white hibiscus flower blowing

in her black, black hair. 

 

The bodies of our fathers, flat-bellied

in their crisp-pressed uniforms, 

standing near the wings 

of the Flying Fortress, on the deck

of the Massachusetts. My father grins

at a monkey on his lifted arm, 

on a tiny island purpose-built

refueling stop. All those

kept safe for us by luck.

 

Time startled and lurching forward,

we still carry them: 

 

The bodies of our mothers rocking

with ours, groaning with us

when we are ill—the smell,

still in my nose, of my mother’s

richly metallic fertile blood

on the Kotex in the bathroom, 

the carving out of her womb,

and so many others’—the decades

beating furiously away,                                                          

the long a-a-h of their sighs,

as they settle into our warm cars

to be taken to the doctor’s.

 

The bodies of our fathers, their huge hands

under our backs as they teach us

how to float, their sturdy shoulders

we ride into the breakers—                                                     

my father’s arms cradling

my four-year-old body zonked on

the cherries I stole from a tray

of Manhattans at an aunt’s wedding, 

home we go, home, on the subway—

the careless crowding generations,

the cracking of their chests, 

their plaintive reedy cheeps, But I enjoy it,

when we urge them not to eat fast-food.

 

We carry them—their years fanned out

again, unshelved—as we are carried towards

the indignities of our own bodies;

we are together: undone by time/

about to be undone; undone/

about to be undone by the bodies

that carry us. And in me my authors dream

again, as I dream—imagining my progeny

re-birthing me in all my hope—

a lustrous dream of being carried

forward.

 

——–

Originally published in Sheila-Na-Gig