You’re still in the cardiology ward, 
after an “event” yet to be fully diagnosed, 
and I’m still trembling within, but 
a tiny bit heart-healed myself since 
the angiogram you’ve just had reminded 
us that in the heart beneath that chest 
I love to press my check against, there are 
collaterals that inflated themselves 
after your right coronary artery closed down, 
some years past, helpful right-side vessels—
like weaker beings, who, united, 
found their strength. We’ve just learned, too, 
that there are even bridging collaterals 
from your left circumflex (which has 
two partial occlusions, one new) 
that also reached out—like big-hearted souls, 
who, though their own side lacks, 
extend a hand to their opposite. 

Which reminds me of when, thirty years ago, 
my dad’s cardiologist discovered 
that the Boy Wonder Surgeon of Mt. Sinai, 
who’d performed my dad’s bypass surgery 
many years before, bypassed the wrong artery. 
When I gasped he said, “An artery can be hard 
to find, when you’re holding a heart 
in your hands, and they’re all wriggling!” 
But would you believe another artery 
converted and reversed its flow, 
so blood could feed the needy part 
of my dad’s heart! 

How much we’d love to believe there’s teleology 
in the material—not random doom 
or luck, or even homeostasis that can rule 
or fail, but, somehow, God, 
rooting for local us, here 
on this blue perishable planet 
in a star system on a little arm of the Milky Way 
that probably contains billions of mutating planets—
even some with other forms of life—
and is one of an unimaginable two trillion 
galaxies separated by the prodigious voids 
that constitute most of the universe. 

Here, in this faltering body still imagining 
constancy—like yours, my heart—
I will even so try to raise my infinitesimally small, 
flickering flame of hope and gratefulness. 

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 hybrid memoir in essays and poems, Apartness, was published by the Inlandia Institute in February, 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/