A glow like the remnants of sunset 
seeping in through greased paper windows 
in a flown dream of imagined ancestors, 
who might have held the key to your legacy. 

Or like the almost-shimmer 
of two folio-sized parchment leaves—
the last remains of a prized holy book 
on the answer to an unphrasable question—
which lie among the other worn-out pages 
(intended for burial because they bear 
the unspeakable Name of God) in the clutter 
of a long-abandoned synagogue’s attic—
and have not been discovered. 

*The painting may be viewed in a blog post by Madeline Anne Harlow (3 June 2016): Mark Rothko Black on Maroon Tate Modern Review

Judy Kronenfeld’s

six full-length books of poetry include If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2024); Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022); Bird Flying Through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017); Shimmer (WordTech, 2012); and Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths (second edition, Antrim House, 2012), the latter which won the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize.

Her third chapbook, Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! was released by Bamboo Dart Press in June, 2024. Her memoir-in-essays, Apartness, is forthcoming from Inlandia Books early in 2025.

Judy’s poems have appeared in four dozen anthologies and in numerous journals including Cider Press Review, DMQ Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, Offcourse, One (Jacar Press), ONE ART, Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig, 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 work has been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize, and has also been nominated for Best of the Net.

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/