Luminous, just-stopped rain 
pooled on the park 
walkway makes it look 
like an antique silver-plated 
tray, showing base metal 
in a few worn places. 

But there’s more than enough 
shine left to mirror a man 
in overcoat and fedora, 
taking his warmly dressed kids out 
on their roller skates 
in the depth of winter, when 
the park benches are all deserted. 
His slowly skating son grips 
his hand; his daughter’s stopped, 
waiting for her family 
to catch up. 

Their silhouettes are framed 
by a bower of bare branches 
in the puddle, as if in a darkened 
Renaissance fresco. The emerging sun’s 
reflection glows on the man’s 
shoulder like a halo. 

There were narrow streets 
in my early childhood 
that were treeless, bleaker. 
But I didn’t know to name them 
squalid, I didn’t know 
to call them foul. 

Even there, windows shone 
with the world, or caught the sun 
because my father walked 
with me, saying, Breathe, 
open your coat, it’s not 
really cold.  

*After a photograph by American photographer Vivian Maier (1926–2009), Slide Number 50 (3 September 1954) in the Street 4 portfolio at the Maloof Collection online: http://www.vivianmaier.com/

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 is Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! (Bamboo Dart Press, 2024). Her newest book is a hybrid memoir in essays and poems, Apartness, 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; 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 is Lecturer Emerita, Department of Creative Writing, UC Riverside. In another life, she produced scholarship on her English Renaissance loves—George Herbert, John Donne, and Shakespeare— including King Lear and the Naked Truth: Rethinking the Languages of Religion and the Resistance (Duke University Press, 1998).

Author’s website: http://www.judykronenfeld.com/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

Additional poems by Judy Kronenfeld in MacQueen’s Quinterly that were inspired by Vivian Maier’s photographs at the Maloof Collection online:

⚡ Confidence in Issue 23 of MacQ (April 2024), after Maier’s Slide Number 22 in her Street 2 portfolio

⚡ Crumpled Man on the Sidewalk, 1953 in MacQ-19 (August 2023), after Maier’s Slide Number 39 in her Street 2 portfolio

⚡ Two Little Girls, Face to Face in MacQ-19 (August 2023), after Maier’s Slide Number 7 in her Street 4 portfolio

⚡ Freeze in MacQ-16 (January 2023), after Maier’s Slide Number 29 in her Street 1 portfolio