From Those Who Have Nothing
More Will Be Taken
Bless them whose beds
are cardboard
Who break a popsicle
in pieces in scorching weather
Who share a pair of shoes
more holes than leather
Who elbow past each other
for a shard of glass
on Smoky Mountain—
Whose methane-burnt hands
are gashed when the sanitation
truck—Limpieza Es Salud!—
unloads the day’s treasure:
shitty diapers
syringes, tubing
body parts
bottles, cans
a needle in a haystack’s worth
of copper, maybe bronze
Who compete
with snuffling pigs, dogs
vultures, crows
Who fear redevelopment
will make them lose
their dunghill
Who sniff glue
While our prayers
drop from cliffs
thicken on our shading trees
fill the chinks in our walls
Copyright Judy Kronenfeld 2014
Judy Kronenfeld’s most recent collections of poetry are Shimmer (WordTech Editions, 2012) and the second edition of Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize (Antrim House, 2012). Her poems have appeared in many print and online journals such as Calyx, Cimarron Review, The American Poetry Journal, Natural Bridge, Poetry International, Spoon River Poetry Review, Women’s Review of Books, and The Pedestal; two dozen poems have appeared in anthologies such as 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 online poetry journal, Poemeleon. She has given or participated in 100 readings including two at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda in 2013 and would love to read in the area again. Visit her website (where you can also hear her read her work) at http://judykronenfeld.com.
