Jen Karetnick


Evaporating Villanelle During a Time of Pandemic 


Grief arrives often into the middle
of things, interjected like a comma
that survives, woven into the saddle

of a list chosen by Oxford for battle,
twanging every axon in the soma.
Grief arrives often into the middle

and rarely softens,
demagoguery
that survives, woven

into the sodden
season, sharp-eyed, spry.
Grief arrives, sudden

serrated knives.
Fabric frayed
that survives—

defended;
amended.
Grief arrives.
That survives.

 


I Live at Ground Zero of the Climate Exodus;
Or, How to Sell a Waterfront Home in Miami


With every king tide the land loosens a little more,
a floral caftan to wear after surgery. Underground,

the concrete walls of the houses spall, crackling
like cellophane. The iguanas seem strong now,

flexing their tails and shitting in pools with typical
arrogance, far more equipped to survive than I am,

but one day they will be cut off from the mainland,
the distances too far to swim, the woolly mammoths

of the millennial generation. Left to inbreed, their genes
will become asteroids of their ancestors’ making.

It’s too late for the maybe-someday, the if-or-when day.
Even the least honest realtors acknowledge where not

to buy, if you’re local, know which communities are
a harder sell—these they peddle to half-timers who can

afford to have no wind insurance or worry, who privately
jet away from storms into the peace of other primary

residences, where peacocks don’t stalk the roads, chevroned
by dried saline, attracted to the fish and frogs left behind

when the water recedes like a hairline, leaving its prickly
evidence of once-was. This is how it is to long for something

I haven’t even left yet, steeped in nostalgia like old tea
leaves that have barely any hue and even less future to give,

like the beaches here, bony under mounds of the sargassum
smothering the sea turtles, the crabs and lobsters. Oh, the static,

interstitial species. How they, too, can’t obey the logic to go
when the draw is so magnetic to stay. Still, I plug the address

of every available house into the FEMA Flood Map Service Center,
bury Saint Joseph upside-down near the “For Sale” sign, pray that

his discomfort in the dark will lead me to some kind of light—homes
built on natural oolite ridges or manufactured rises, complete with

impact windows and hurricane-proof doors—and every day watch
the statue’s feet get washed by the mother who is all of our toxic

mothers, protrude a little more from the eroding ground, leaning
inland, inland, inland, where we will both be reborn as eventuality.

 
Jen Karetnick

Jen Karetnick is the author of 10 poetry collections, including Hunger Until It's Pain (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming spring 2023); The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, August 2020); and The Crossing Over (March 2019), winner of the 2018 Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition. Her poems appear recently in Barrow Street, december, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Terrain. Co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, Jen is currently a Deering Estate Artist-in-Residence. See jkaretnick.com.

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