Jen Karetnick

Galaxies

An American sentence acrostic golden shovel, after the Indigo Girls

Grooving around our small town on the last night before college, we wondered, What
about the predicted meteor shower? Clouds were balled-up tissues, half-blotting. Would

telescopes, which we didn’t have, make a difference in how to perceive distances? You,
the ever-optimist, armed only with my favorite ice cream, pretended that luck would give

amateur stargazers like us the opportunities for bursts of clarity. But even with tools for
astronomers we would have had a difficult time detecting bolides. I watched instead your

light travel first to the future, then back to when you found me hiding behind books as a kid.
Up in the sky, somewhere beyond, dying constellations took down the stories of my fears.

Glory Is the Passing Kidney Stone

An American sentence acrostic

Praise the canine squeaky-toy seize in the stomach, hoof in
the abdomen, skittery, glancing, under-the-ribs

fishtail of warning. Praise the ripple that the clinched
palms row over in the lake of the body,

that the breath hiccups and hitches with,
never failing to be taken by surprise, praise its

stop-and-start nature that jerks you like a hook
rising from the depths to the surface, bringing

up nothing but seaweed, the bait stolen
in an underwater coup d’état. Praise this organ

worship from the inside-out, the blood given in honor
of it, or taken from it, tinging the pale streams of

sun that plunge from you into crimson, rebel brilliance.

The winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award for Inheritance with a High Error Rate (January 2024), Jen Karetnick (Twitter: @Kavetchnik or Instagram: @JenKaretnick) is the author of 10 additional poetry collections, including the chapbook What Forges Us Steel: The Judge Judy Poems (Alternating Current Press, July 2024). Her work has won the Tiferet Writing Contest for Poetry, Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition, Hart Crane Memorial Prize, and Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, among others, and received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Wildacres Retreat, Mother’s Milk Artist Residency, Artists in Residence in the Everglades, and elsewhere. The co-founder/managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has recent or forthcoming work in Bellevue Literary Review, Cold Mountain Review, Harpur Palate, Plume Poetry Journal, Shenandoah, South Dakota Review, and elsewhere. Jen’s doctors have told her to cut down on sweets, to which she asks, Is white wine a sweet?