Simeon Kronenberg
Simeon Kronenberg has published poetry, reviews, interviews and essays in Australian poetry journals and anthologies, including Best Australian Poems, 2017. In 2014 he won the Second Bite Poetry Prize and in 2015 was short-listed for the Newcastle Poetry Prize. Distance, his first poetry collection was published in 2018 by Pitt Street Poetry.
Window
1951
I stood barefoot
on cool boards
in the hot kitchen.
Overhead
fly paper hung
from a dusty bulb
yellow and thick
with flies.
She looked out
the window
stared into glare.
All was quiet
but for the relentless
hum of blow flies
trapped
between screen
and glass
and the low mutter
of a wireless
in the next room
as he listened
to afternoon news.
Aunt
An upturned grey mouth
green faded eyes
face and eye-lids
dry as dust on snake skin.
She managed
in a long brown house
that leaned
next to a woodpile
stacked by a son
reluctant, intermittent.
Mostly, she sat
at a table
a wireless tuned
all day to the races
as she scratched
at the forms
occasionally lurching
after whiskey.
Though she broke
a hip or two: Heard the cracks.
Tripped
on raised
linoleum
a snare across the floor
as she shuffled
a long
dark passage
to bed.