And Judy Kronenfeld's new chapbook, Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! was just released by Bamboo Dart Press in June. We are looking forward to hearing them both.
In addition to the features, Two segments of open mic will be available and refreshments will be served. Bring your best poems for the open and enjoy The Bolton Hall Museum, 10110 Commerce Ave, Tujunga, CA 91040. Bolton Hall is a Los Angeles Historical Landmark built in 1913. Our reading starts at 4:30 pm and goes till 6:30 pm.
Judy Kronenfeld’s six full-length books of poetry include If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024), Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2022), Shimmer (WordTech, 2012), and Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, 2nd edition (Antrim House, 2012)—winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize. Her third chapbook, Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! was just released by Bamboo Dart Press in June. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Cider Press Review, Cimarron Review, DMQ Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, Offcourse, One (Jacar Press), One Art, Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig, Slant, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verdad, and Your Daily Poem. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Hippocampus and Kaleidoscope, and frequently in Under the Sun, among other journals. Her more occasional short fiction has been published in the Madison Review, Literary Mama, the Loch Raven Review, and elsewhere. Apartness: A Memoir in Essays and Poems will be released by Inlandia Books in 2025. A Stanford Ph.D. in English (1971), Judy published a controversial book on Shakespeare and Shakespeare criticism, King Lear and the Naked Truth (Duke U.P., 1998) and a dozen articles on English Renaissance and other literatures, before turning her attention completely to creative work. She taught English Literature at UC Riverside, UC Irvine and Purdue University, and is now Lecturer Emerita, Creative Writing Department, UC Riverside, having retired after more than two decades teaching there. Judy is a native New Yorker, raised in the Bronx, but has lived most of her life in her beloved California—in Riverside—with her anthropologist husband. Their two children and four grandchildren live (way too!) far away in Maryland.
Three Poems by Judy Kronenfeld
City Benches in the Sun
The way people sometimes sit
on benches in cities: as if the April air
and breeze and sun were not available
elsewhere, or for long, so they must tilt
their faces upward, must even close
their eyes, and not talk or observe
the scene, just let the breeze
and warmth flow over them...
Is it simply a matter of choosing to collect
one’s self for a while, after visiting
a sick mother in the hospital,
or going to the employment agency,
or the unemployment office, or
taking the kids to their father’s
for his week, or several of these
in one rushed day?
But no,
even the dowagers of leisure
in their eight-room apartments feel compelled
to dress themselves on a glorious spring
morning, to descend in the elevator,
to nod and smile as the doorman,
opening the glass and shiny brass door,
greets them by name, and to walk over
to join the stream of humanity—
a small branch of which is sitting now
on a well-used bench near a tree
just leafing out in palest green
on the median of this crowded
two-way street—their chins lifted, sun
glowing red-orange on the inside
of their lids—basking as if on the Riviera.
Published in MacQueen’s Quinterly 23 (April 2024)
Mind-too-full-ness
With every fragment of my one precious,
dwindling life, I am trying to focus
on these strawberries I bought for breakfast
as I wash them—enormous berries,
that look as if they’ve been given hormones,
like steers and heifers, and a little too crisp
on my knife, I notice, as I quarter them
into a bowl—unlike the miniscule
and profoundly sweet wild ones I would like
to find in a hilltop patch in some idyllic future—
berries that would stain my hands as I stuff them,
three after two in my mouth, whose juices
would dribble down my chin.
I drag my attention, kicking, back to the present,
marvel at the multitude of strawberry
seeds on each piece—tiny slightly quizzical
eyebrows all over the red flesh—which lead me
away to nature’s contingency plans,
her overcompensation for bad odds:
the leathery pomegranate pouch packed
with hundreds of arils bejeweled in glistening,
delicious ruby pulp; frogs that produce thousand-egg
clouds; fish that release millions at one go.
And oh! the hundred little turtle hatchlings
I watched on a video last week. Cheered
by onlookers, they clambered out of the nest,
then flippered laboriously over mountains
and valleys of sand to the sea, where maybe
one in a thousand (on a good day) or one
in ten thousand (on a bad) won’t be scooped up
by a barracuda or plucked by a gull.
I’m trying to tug my eyes back
to the cheerful strawberries in their white bowl,
trying to haul myself with gratitude back
to the warmth of my kitchen, back to my right arm—
almost healed from a fracture months ago—
actually lifting the bowl, back to your brightening
eyes as I set the berries on our breakfast table
next to the buttered toast.
But, love, I can’t not see the ruined world—
how it empties of deliciousness, brightness
and warmth, how it fills with the sounds
of annihilation by enormous bombs, dulls
to the uniform grey of destroyed cities,
how irrevocably it numbs the starving and stunned,
sitting on the mutilated ground hunched
over their fires—trying to bake a little
ashen bread with the last of the flour.
Published in One Art (Feb 2024)
Deep Travel
I was a child in a five-boroughed Garden of Eden/city—
the given, new, and crumbling, shining, grimy
world. And I heard talk of “sixth boroughs,”
places with the thickness of familiarity, places I imagined
I could pass into with no resistance—the way ghosts passed
through walls in 50s TV fantasies—and be at home.
And now so many once-strange latitudes have addresses in my mind,
which light up warmly when I hear or read their names: 7th, 8th,
9th,
10th , 11th “boroughs,” so different from the 1st
through 6th,
yet naturalized in the longue durée of cumulative or extended visits.
Sometimes there’s a kind of placeless favorite weather in my dreams,
jacket-cool as June in Norway, or autumn in the little park not far
from our Bronx apartment—light glancing, breeze-tossed, in the trees—
and I don’t know where I am. Or there’s a rhythmic brilliance
of magenta, flame, and lavender, that could be the joyous spring decor
in lamppost flowerpots in almost any town in France, or my long-gone
aunt’s hanging baskets down-dripping with impatiens in her summer
garden in Roslyn, Long Island. Sometimes I savor a sense
of restful busyness in whatever task I’m carrying out—
like the calm of Fanti fishermen mending their nets
on the Ghanaian coast, their smooth backs gleaming in the sun.
Sometimes my loneliness feels summed by a solitary red
farmhouse casting its shadow on the snow—on a spit of land
jutting into a fjord, or on the great plains of North Dakota.
Some part of me yet hopes, when I’m poled across
that last black frothing river, I will disembark
with no resistance, and be welcome
in the final borough, the 12th, perhaps.
Published in Cider Press Review 23, Issue 5 (Dec. 2021)
Lee Rossi describes himself as a “vertically integrated poetry conglomerate.” He writes poems and reviews, and has interviewed such poets as Robert Pinsky, Carolyn Forché, Edward Hirsch, D. Nurkse, and many others. In addition to several Pushcart nominations, he is the winner of the Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and the Steve Kowit Prize. He has published five volumes of poetry, most recently Say Anything, from Plain View Press. Individual poems have appeared in The Southwest Review, Rattle, Spillway, The Chiron Review, The Southern Review and many other venues. His reviews and interviews can be found at Pedestal.org, Rain Taxi, Rhino Reviews, and Poetry Flash. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and a Contributing Editor to Poetry Flash.
Say Anything, his latest book, an Editor’s Choice at Publishers Weekly, wins this praise: “Readers seeking a spiritual, sophisticated collection will find depth, lightness, and surprising illumination in Rossi’s poetry, ‘whose only motive is joy.’”
Of Wheelchair Samurai, an earlier volume, the memoirist Frances Lefkowitz writes: “As Rossi says in one of these poems, ‘surfaces betray.’ And so he delves, finding the truth that lies beneath. The poetry in this compelling collection exposes the dark and the light of human relationships.”
And of Darwin’s Garden, his fourth collection, Marsha de la O, author of Creature and Antidote for Night and , tells us that: “Much as Darwin walked his ‘thinking path’ in his garden in Kent, Lee Rossi teases out the hidden structures of experience in this remarkable work on childhood, bearing the freight of ancestors, masculine codes, sex, religion, and the not-so-tender mercies of nuns, and parents.”
Four Poems by Lee Rossi
The Jogger
He ripped the jack from his iPod
as if cancelling his subscription to God.
It was her song, the one with her face
on its flag, the flag she speared
into the permafrost of his heart
claiming him forever.
She was a surgeon
who makes beautiful incisions
but forgets to close the hole.
The evening was soft,
moisture trickling
down the faces of the leaves.
He could leave the park
and return to the uncertain
weather of his apartment.
Or he could stand there beside
the path, cord dangling
like a patient in ICU who
cuts his own life support.
Published in Midnight Chem#2
I Ken Him
You were the legal eagle,
but who was the carrion?
You were the gun-dealer, the gun-toter.
the loader of shotgun shells,
dispenser of pills —
payment for services rendered,
legal opinions for illegal drugs,
books cooked on request.
You were the meter of discipline,
the palm of punishment, the back hand
of pain, the how-dare-you-smile,
was-that-a-smirk at family dinner,
the go-to-your-room, the drop-your-shorts,
drop-your-underpants, the palm of retribution,
you were the shaker and maker of cocktails,
oligarch of olives, herald of hangovers,
you were the overhearer of every phone call,
the interrogator of every attempt to leave
(a walk to the store, a breath of fresh air),
you knew every inch of the house
(and why not, there were so few inches)
and what belonged in each and every place,
you were policeman, prosecutor and judge,
maximum sentence magistrate, appeals court,
parole board, trustee and warden.
there was no escaping you,
not even when I married,
not even when you died.
Published in San Diego Poetry Annual 2023
The Air
Every time we breathe we take in—
hum along with me now:
oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide,
ozone (ozone!) and lots of other stuff
we call particulate matter,
all the parts and particles of a
million particular things—
we breathe but don’t even notice
it, floating there catching a stray
photon and beaming it in your face—
flakes of skin, bits of hair,
elephant dander, hyena fuzz,
grains of sand, their diamond glitter
all the way from Africa and Arabia,
dried llama and yak “dirt,”
all of it a swirl in the green
and blue. And what about water vapor,
those tiny mirrors that mirror
the tiny oceans of our bodies,
their islands and rivers,
their teeming lifeforms,
upstream and down. Take a
whiff, a deep, deep breath—
the world, the whole spinning world!
Published in Caesura
2023
Cuckoo
“There’s always more happening than we can bear!” Tomas Transtrōmer
First it’s one pill daily for hypertension.
Then hearing aids so I don’t have to listen to my kids complain that I don’t listen.
Then a pill to keep my tent pole erect.
Then a mold to keep my flat right foot from yelling.
Then more pills, 6 then 8, when my arthritis becomes unbearable,
my immune system attacking my joints.
Then my dog starts losing his hair and can’t climb stairs.
Then covid damages my heart—another pill with more to come.
Meanwhile the ruby-throated hummingbird who thinks this yard belongs to him—
he tells me he doesn’t need legal documents like deeds and wills—
buzzes anyone he doesn’t recognize or like.
Sometimes he likes me, sometimes he hovers over my shoulder
like a black helicopter about to unleash its load of rockets.
We’re like an old married couple, except we aren’t.
We’re predator and predator, David and Goliath,
Jack and the Giant. The quick and the dying..
Published in Lips Spring 2023
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