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Issue 19: | 15 Aug. 2023 |
Poem: | 252 words |
—After a photograph by Vivian Maier*
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/
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/
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