Naked under my sheets and paper gown, I arrive 
on a gurney, and, on the count of three, am brought 
to the hard narrow pallet beyond hesitation, 
surrounded by masked attendees entirely swathed 
in green. Their eyes below their headlights, 
behind their face shields, make no contact. 

The unannounced relaxant has already begun 
to induce surrender, yet buried within me, 
there’s a radiating scream—like the one 
in Edvard Munch’s painting. 
But my lips remain compressed 
by the rules of patient decorum. 

Gown and sheets will be stripped, replaced 
by new sterile draping baring the site of interest, 
when I—unwarned—have blinked out of consciousness. 
My inert body will be briefly exposed, then 
my newly draped one will reveal my chest, 
as the bodies around me, sheathed to the teeth, 
bend to their tasks. 

What I would give not to need to be here! 
Oh, to be transmuted! Even into that nude female 
seated near the brioche and cerises 
in Édouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur L’Herbe—
cast in a man’s dream of dapper 
clothed men and disrobed women, 
yet quite removed and utterly at ease, 
smiling her faintly daring smile 
at viewers, her power still hers. 

Publisher’s Note:

Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass), an oil-on-canvas painting (1863) by Édouard Manet (1832–1883), is displayed at Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

Judy Kronenfeld’s

memoir-in-essays, Apartness, is forthcoming from Inlandia Books in 2024/2025. Her eighth collection, a chapbook of poems, If Only There Were Stations of the Air, will be published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in early 2024; and her ninth, another chapbook, Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! will be released by Bamboo Dart Press in June, 2024.

Her seventh collection, which is 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).

Judy’s 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/