Featured Poet Jen Karetnick
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Jen Karetnick
Featured Poet Jen Karetnick
Jen Karetnick is the author of five full-length poetry collections, including Hunger Until It's Pain (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming spring 2023); The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, forthcoming August 2020); and The Treasures That Prevail (Whitepoint Press, September 2016), finalist for the 2017 Poetry Society of Virginia Book Prize. She is also the author of five poetry chapbooks, including The Crossing Over (March 2019), winner of the 2018 Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition. Her poems have been awarded the Hart Crane Memorial Prize, the Romeo Lemay Poetry Prize, the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, and two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes, among others. Her work appears recently or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, The Comstock Review, december, Michigan Quarterly Review, Terrain, Under a Warm Green Linden, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, Jen is currently a Deering Estate Artist-in-Residence. Find her on Twitter @Kavetchnik and Instagram @JenKaretnick, or see her website.
What My Autopsy Will Reveal
The glass houses of organs were bottles
with ships atilt inside. Stones made fences
where not even dust should have been raised.
Hits were recorded, not recovered from; meals
became anthropologic; wisdom was lost
long before memory was impacted like molars.
A tree damaged more than fifty percent in a storm,
this body, split along the sap lines, should have
long ago been removed, stump dug up,
trunk ground down, its remains spread
over the mango roots to fertilize the living fruit,
the one task it could embrace without failure.
*From American Sentencing (Winter Goose Publishing, May 2016), long-listed for the 2017 Julie Suk Award from Jacar Press and the 2017 Lascaux Prize; previously published in Mount Hope and republished in Daily Verse.
Skiing Barefoot over the Wrecks
“I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.”
-- Adrienne Rich
The trick is to ease
the hold on the handle,
don’t allow knuckles
to knot like curtains
over a rod braced
between the shoulders
of a double-hung window.
I lie back in the water
to start, feet meeting
hands greeting rope
at mid-thigh,
ears immersed
in the amniotic boullion,
listening only
to the heartbeat of the ocean
as if there is no other
world, was never
another world,
below me.
I give a thumbs-up
to the driver of the boat
who will ease me,
feeding me out
from the other
end of this cord,
before pulling taut
and I resist the drag.
This is not labor.
The spray claps my face
like applause, each drop
one of approval,
and while the wind
in my hair is generated,
the source of its power
is not man-drilled,
not a god
but the childish,
oblivious sun, who cares
nothing about what goes
on underneath it,
about what it can
or cannot dry up.
And I am up,
riding the weedy surface
on the flats of my feet,
over flooded, flattened
houses whose ghosts
billow under my soles,
blowing up
into a white-tipped
wake that my heels
zip through, sun-bruised,
mango-cured, tough
as sharks. Still
they are spiny
sea urchins, these spirits
of screened-in Florida
rooms where pianos used
to wait for hands reluctant
as fire in wet saw grass,
underutilized kitchens
owned by diners
who preferred restaurants,
bedrooms that saw nothing
more than too little
sleep, achieved
with the open mouth
of the dead
and disrespectful.
Now the Dade County
pine floors, once
so prized and polished
or scarred by termites
and the careening
claws of dogs have rotted,
either way, into driftwood.
Coral has gone back
to coral. The dogs
who have been left to us
wear lifejackets
and the dead live again,
reefs for grouper
and parrotfish.
If I look down
into the foundations
of heartbreak and recovery,
epiphanies and realizations,
culminations and failures,
I, too, will fall,
forgetting all fundamentals,
unable to tuck and roll,
my external walls
shooting nails
in every direction
to wash up later
on the beaches like teeth,
each room of my body
cartwheeling into disrepair.
So I keep my eyes
forward, toward
what would be
the ponytails of palms
and the canopies of mangos
if those trees still rooted
here, and my grip
casual, thumbs lined up
next to index fingers
as if on a golf club,
holding on
to nothing too dear
too dearly.
*From The Treasures That Prevail (Whitepoint Press, September 2016), Finalist for the 2017 Virginia Poetry Society Book Prize; formerly featured at Houston Poetry Fest 2014 and previously published in the Houston Poetry Fest Anthology.