by Jen Karetnick
After the Washed Up Project by Alejandro Duran
Curved like a draining sink,
a heavy book, like a mouth
on the edge of speaking,
these are the ruins we witness,
the color of the moment
not of this earth: boiled-down
beets, fish-strange, muscled
and muscled again. Their curious
engulfed silhouettes fail
to apologize, stand in a forest
that cannot bring you faith,
bombastic and flooded
with unremembered names.
The veins of dead vines
festooning the frame
in their reckless climb up
the trellis momentarily
hide the sun, skewer
everything—a firmament
moving on while the spiral
doubles back on itself.
An Oliver de la Paz ekocento
Source poems:
“At the Time of My Birth;” “How I Learned Bliss;” “Aubade with Bread for the Sparrows;” “In Defense of Small Towns;” “Autism Screening Questionnaire — Speech and Language Delay;” “By Substraction;” “Solve for X;” “Dear Empire [these are your temples];” “Hour of Dawn;” “School Years;” “Diaspora Sonnet 50;” “Diaspora Sonnet 51;” “Diaspora Sonnet 52;” “Diaspora Sonnet 54;” “Diaspora Sonnet 11;” “Diaspora Sonnet 13;” “Diaspora 2;” “Diaspora Sonnet 25;” “Labyrinth 8;” “Labyrinth 16;” “Labyrinth 9”
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 