Judy Kronenfeld
If Only There Were Stations of the Air
ISBN: 978-1-962405-01-0
$12.80 pre-order sale until April 1, 2024 ($4.00 US Shipping)
Shipping in late March/Early April
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 chapbook, Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements!, will be released by Bamboo Dart Press in June, 2024. Judy is Lecturer Emerita, Department of Creative Writing, UC Riverside.
Blue Corduroy Baseball Cap
The blue corduroy baseball cap I bought you
years ago vanished after a brief trip.
Strange, how I had to make a place
for its absence in my mind. And how
our reunion with it (it had squeezed itself
under the driver’s seat of our car)
made all right with the world.
You lost it again, some days later,
when we went to Radiology
for my routine-but-you-never-know test,
and we had to backtrack to the clinic
(though it would have been nicer to keep sipping
our post-medical-appointment reward lattes
at our corner table in the café).
The cap wasn’t on the seat where you’d waited
while I checked in, nor the one where you’d sat
while I registered, nor the one where you’d finished
your crossword while the ultrasound wand
moved across my neck. Sorry, no-one
turned it in, they shook their heads
at check-in and registration desks.
But a sweet-faced woman at the exit
noticed our downturned mouths and heard
our laments (Reclaimed, only to be
lost again!), chirped Oh! I’ll inquire
in the back and, somehow, returned with the hat.
How luxuriously we wallowed in its stunning
comeback—lucked up twice in one week!
As if a little kindness and attention
could balance all askew ledgers
and return everything ever missed.
Gods of mercy and grief, I will bend the knee,
I will bow down—I want you to know how thankful,
how grateful I am for this velvety blue hat once again
covering my husband’s chilly bald head,
from which recent memories are beginning
to drift away, making me so afraid.
how grateful I am for this velvety blue hat once again
covering my husband’s chilly bald head,
from which recent memories are beginning
to drift away, making me so afraid.
