Fledgeling’s First Date, Recalled Six Decades Later

by Judy Kronenfeld


My straitlaced immigrant Mom—so wary
of the ways of men—was disturbingly excited,
offering her finest matte plumage—her black velvet
sheath with its silk cummerbund. Neither of us
knew how wrong that was for a high school play.
I was fourteen, wings untried.

It felt like she was pushing me
out of the nest, shooing me off to the sort
of festival my Moroccan-born son-in-law,
fifty years later, would tell me takes place
in an Atlas Mountains village:
the adolescent girls and boys cut loose,
but expected to return paired for life—
like rare monogamous birds—in two days.  

My date was this kid of sixteen I’d danced with
twice at one of my girls’ school mixers.
His dancing was cloddy and didn’t entice.
He didn’t inspire flights of fancying.
But wasn’t all that beside the point?
The prerequisite for going out was being asked.

We could barely work out how
to talk. Of course he draped his arm
around my shoulder after the last curtain call
and steered me towards “a walk”
through the dark corridors of his school. I knew
his kiss was coming, but wanted to duck.

I once saw a cardinal—carrying a seed—
touch beaks with a female, so she
could accept his gift. My dream
of a first meeting of lips was that delicate.
But this boy thrust his tongue into my mouth
like a burrowing snake, so deep
I gagged. What was this?

At least he didn’t persist. It was 1957.
He escorted me home on the bus.
I flew out of his grasp to my door,
and, when he called a week later,
was “busy” every day he broached
for a repeat. At last I’d found
my own territorial sweet song.


* * * * *

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, 2017), Shimmer (WordTech, 2012), and Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, 2^nd edition (Antrim House, 2012)—winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize. Her third chapbook is Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! (Bamboo Dart, 2024). Her poems have appeared in such journals as Cimarron Review, DMQ Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, Offcourse, One (Jacar Press), One Art, Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Verdad.