January 2024
Bio Note: I'm a retired college teacher of Literature and Creative Writing, living for decades in California with my also retired anthropologist husband. We're now seriously thinking of moving to Maryland where our kids and grandkids live. My eighth and ninth collections of poetry, both chapbooks, will come out in 2024: If Only There Were Stations of the Air from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, and Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! from Bamboo Dart Press. A hybrid memoir in essays alternating with poems, Apartness, will be published by Inlandia Books in 2024/2025.
Two Little Girls, Face to Face
—After a photograph by Vivian Maier* The one on the right’s the plotter in mid-syllable, hatching some plan, telling some secret—perhaps she’ll exact a pinky promise. Proprietary as a guy with duck’s-ass haircut, and sleeves rolled up to show his biceps, who dangles his fingers over his gal’s shoulder, she takes charge with an arm slung around her little friend’s. A few mussed wisps of her hair cling to the other girl’s bangs. Behind them—ugliness. A battered city wall with indecipherable scribbles in chalk. But they are beautiful, and neat and cared for. The blonde’s well-cut hair and the brunette’s waves caught in a barrette are clean, and shine. How wonderful—the listener’s singular focus, her face turned wholly to take in, to follow, unstinting—she seems hushed with the awe of being claimed. We played in swarms in elementary school— I don’t think I ever gave such rapt attention to a friend, and surely never received it. Though there was one girl, in fifth grade, whose freedom utterly compelled me. I must have looked at her like this when she couldn’t see. * https://www.vivianmaier.com/gallery/street-4/#slide-7
Originally published in MacQueen’s Quinterly 19 (August, 2023).
If I Could Use the Wind Phone...
Inside [the phone box] there is an old black telephone, disconnected, that carries voices into the wind....[P]eople who have lost someone... pick up the receiver to speak to the other side. —Literary Hub, March 17, 2021 I think I would feel shy with Mom and Dad, settled for decades in their grey subterranean country, wandering passageways in their no longer new shapes permeable as vapor, whispering in their no longer new language—fainter than air brushing my ears— and faltering, now, in the language we once shared. It might be easier to talk with my brother-in-law, only three years gone, to finally return his generous weekly calls inquiring after each of the members of his brother’s nuclear family, even the dogs. Perhaps I could be hearty with him, as if he were in for a brief hospital stay, and coming home soon. But my questions would stick in my throat, as they do when I think of my uncles and aunts, my sister-in-law, my cousins and friends—all dispersed on the wind: Are you sleeping comfortably? Are you able to eat? Those who manage to use the wind phone must talk the way I talk to our living dogs, patting myself with words as I move through my day on those rare occasions when you, my love, have traveled far from home... For my lunch—tuna on sourdough? Or cheese and tomato? Chime in, guys. But if you depart to Forever before me, and silence buzzes like static in my ears, and the house fills with a viscous invisible fog I self-consciously push through, preternaturally alone— your absolute Absence will make all words withdraw.
Originally published in Gyroscope Review (Fall, 2022).
©2024 Judy Kronenfeld
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