After
I take after
my mother, and my mother
is dust
from which…
to which…
—afterthought
after that
thought: still
me, thinking!— neurons firing,
impulses leaping across
synaptic clefts, eccentrically networking
until
like the language of a last
speaker…mine folds up
like a flag. And there is no-one
to receive it. There are no after
words I am translated
into stillness
Afterwards,
I will have stopped
sweating the hours to the top
of the hill, watching them
drain away, pushing them up
again
Bread
Even the packaged kind—
twisty tie untwisted—
sends up its yeasty plume
to the nose, its celebration
of morning hunger,
[…]
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Judy Kroenfeld’s books include the poetry collections Shimmer (WordTech Editions in 2012) and Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths (winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize, 2nd edition, Antrim House, 2012), and the chapbook Ghost Nurseries (Finishing Line, 2005). Her poems have appeared in journals including Calyx, Cimarron Review, The American Poetry Journal, Natural Bridge, Poetry International, Spoon River Poetry Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Women’s Review of Books, and The Pedestal; and anthologies including Before There Is Nowhere to Stand: Palestine/Israel: Poets Respond to the Struggle (Lost Horse, 2012), and Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease (Kent State, 2009). She is Lecturer Emerita, Creative Writing Dept., University of California, Riverside, and Associate Editor of the poetry journal, Poemeleon.