by Jen Karetnick
A beautiful outlaw
Cryogenically frozen screwworm flies are released in Equador
to combat an invasion of their own species. Once defrosted,
alert as pilots, they will hijack the next-door herbivore
quadruped, lay eggs. They will damage the cattle trade, already
suffering failures, the weakest sheep, the nearby deer. But the idea
is that, sterilized, they’ll expire as well. They can’t enjamb
themselves into orifices as Cochliomyia hominivorax or Chrysomya bezziana
to feed on live flesh q.i.d ‘til their majorities, then wing into warm air
to provoke ever northward, moose by moose. Scientists as high
justices—this is one way to finally blitz an endemic, dissolve a toxic
bond, kill an invasion in the equine and bovine communities that elsewise
has no pointed culmination. Goodies laced with insecticide can
also be coaxed to the palates of, say, wild boar, while the domesticated—pigs,
pets, kids—are jabbed with whatever suits. Although we request that this specific
species expires, there’s collateral damage; we could capsize part of the food
chain. But zoology shows us that this particular fly is a parapraxis in kingdom
animalia, and that this Wolbachia-prohibiting approach might also stop Zika from
overt distribution by rubbing out junior mosquitos. And malaria. And chikungunya.
In the quarantine zones, where there is not much difference between hibernate
and isolate, in which virus strains have given us a noxious joint grounding, we move,
too, from dormant to awake, emerge without protection and unfruitful in the thaw.
The winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award for Inheritance with a High Error Rate (January 2024), selected by Lauren Camp, Jen Karetnick is the author of 10 additional poetry collections, including the chapbook What Forges Us Steel: The Judge Judy Poems (Alternating Current Press, 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 other honors, and received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Wildacres Retreat, Mother’s Milk Artist Residency, Centrum, Artists in Residence in the Everglades, and elsewhere. The co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has recent or forthcoming work in The American Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Cimarron Review, Cold Mountain Review, Harpur Palate, Missouri Review Poem of the Week, Notre Dame Review, Pleiades, Plume, Shenandoah, South Dakota Review, and Tar River Poetry. See jkaretnick.com.
Emerge Literary Journal 