His body caves inward like a cataclysm 
of rocks fallen still, his knee almost collapsing 
against the shin of his other leg, 
his head bent into a darkness obscuring 
his face. His right hand’s dirt-grimed, 
wrist limp, fingers hovering over the top 
of the scuzzy newsboy cap his thumb touches. 

It’s the Fifties, so he’s in a suit, 
and still somewhat shiny leather 
lace-up shoes with decorative 
perforations. But his sport socks 
are grubby and his suit filthy—spattered 
and splotched with stains. 
There’s a canyon of a rip 
in the sleeve. 

The ring he wears on the middle finger 
of his right hand has lost all three stones. 
His index finger seems to bear 
the imprint of another ring. Perhaps 
his bejeweled fingers once crossed 
each other in his sleep or stupor 
in some vestigial hope. 
Now all they do is repeat: 
here’s what you’ve got—
nothing. 

Whenever we passed such creatures flat out of luck 
on our shopping trips, my mother muttered 
the Yiddish word for pity and tightened her grip 
on my hand, before quickly looking away—
as if what they had—or hadn’t—was catching. 

On her one day off, rather than go to the park 
or movies with Dad and me, she scrubbed 
and scrubbed the gunk that aggregated on our city 
window sills and frames—thick as the paste 
around and under that poor man’s fingernails—
as if that labor could keep us safe. 

*Publisher’s Note:

The photograph referenced in the poem above appears as Slide Number 39 in Vivian Maier’s Street 2 portfolio at this website: http://www.vivianmaier.com/

Judy Kronenfeld’s

memoir-in-essays, Apartness, is forthcoming from Inlandia Books in 2024/2025. Her seventh collection, and her fifth full-length book of poetry, Groaning and Singing was released by FutureCycle 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, Cimarron Review, Connotation Press, Ghost Town, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Verdad. Her stories are published in The Madison Review, The North American Review, Literary Mama, and other magazines, and her creative nonfiction, in Under the Sun; Hippocampus; Inlandia: A Literary Journey; and elsewhere.

Her story The Paisley Scarf was published in The Loch Raven Review (Volume 16, No. 1, 2020) and was nominated for a Pushcart.

Her most recent piece of creative nonfiction, Operating in French, appeared in Kaleidoscope (Number 84, Winter/Spring 2022), pages 14-19.

Judy holds a Stanford PhD in English and has criticism published, including King Lear and the Naked Truth (Duke, 1998). She is Lecturer Emerita, Department of Creative Writing at UC Riverside.

Author’s website: http://www.judykronenfeld.com/