PoetryMagazine.com Editor's Featured Poet Judy Kronenfeld

Judy Kronenfeld
USA

Judy Kronenfeld is the author of three books of poetry and two chapbooks, most recently, Shimmer (WordTech Editions, 2012) and the second edition of Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths (Antrim House, 2012) winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize. She is also the author of a controversial critical study, King Lear and the Naked Truth (Duke, 1998). Her poems have appeared widely in print and online journals (such as American Poetry Journal, Avatar, Calyx, Cimarron Review, Connotation Press, Evansville Review, Hiram Poetry Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Natural Bridge, Poetry International, Portland Review, Sequestrum, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Women’s Review of Books) and in eighteen anthologies including Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease (Kent State, 2009), Before There Is Nowhere to Stand: Palestine/Israel: Poets Respond to the Struggle (Lost Horse, 2012), and Weatherings (Future Cycle, 2015). Her occasional stories and personal essays have appeared in Literary Mama and Under the Sun, among other journals. She is Lecturer Emerita, Department of Creative Writing, UC Riverside, and an Associate Editor of the online poetry journal, Poemeleon. Her new poetry collection, Dark Light Light Dark is currently circulating.http://judykronenfeld.com Amazon.com/author/judykronenfeld

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.

First appeared in The Women’s Review of Books; collected in Ghost Nurseries(Finishing Line, 2005) and then in Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, 2^nd Edition (Antrim House, 2012).

Page 2