Three Poems
After Watching The Bachelor Finale on the Last Night of the Pine Meadow Ranch Residency
An American sentence acrostic after “Magic Power” by Triumph
I’m listening to vinyl on a portable turntable that the sculptor brought with her. I’m feeling
young again because we’re spinning Adam and the Ants: still desperate, still not serious.
I’m telling the historian who studies settler colonialism about those hormonal, vintage,
wild days when Duran Duran played saxophone on a sailboat, flipped furniture over,
and hunted a woman who went quadruped and grease-painted in an indigenous rainforest.
I’m sure Eighties MTV would never pass our current purity tests, though we’re temporarily
free from self-censure after Joey, who looks like my son, old enough to be on reality shows,
got dumped at the altar by one of the final contestants (but not really, because we all knew
the other woman was going to be the fiancée). No matter how we sell it to ourselves, there’s that
magic patriarchy dust we’re always trying to wash right out of our hair, that Disney princess
power we must deconstruct, that Barbie dreamhouse assembled on someone else’s carpet.
Of all the things we can and maybe can’t admit, there’s also the fact that every so often,
the boorish hiss of an old decade p/reoccupies us. In the background, a rooster makes raucous
music, as he does at dawn, or when he’s fighting for clout, or a hen, or the right to strut his barn.
It Was the Heat of the Moment
when my middle school soccer coach
allowed an adult for the undefeated
opposing team to stand in for their missing
goalie. It was the heat of the moment
when I faked out their sweeper, faced
the keeper one-versus-one, scored—
then came to on the pitch like a pebble
thrown into two uniform rings of girls
standing in uncharacteristic adolescent
silence. It was the heat of the moment
when someone’s dad drove me to a hospital
instead of calling for an ambulance,
when I cradled myself in the back seat,
my humerus broken so diagonally
it was a side of a triangle. Whatever
the orthopedist told my mother, it was
also in the heat of the moment that
she agreed to let me go to my first-ever
rock concert that evening even though
I was scheduled for surgery the next morning.
And it was in the heat of the moment
that I woke up for a second time on my back,
my arm a swing above me, a pin kebab-ed
through the eye of my elbow though I thought
it was held up by bandages. Curing like a ham
for weeks, I listened to Asia’s debut album
on a device only recently invented, refused
to eat so I could forego the bedpan, prayed
nightly that I wouldn’t see blood, still
intermittent back then, mudding under me,
forced myself to sleep in the one position
guaranteed to make me snore louder
than any supergroup could ever perform,
drawing visitors from the rotating roommates’
side of the curtain, causing them to pull it back
and spectacle the mechanized girl on the bed.
In the heat of the moment, the interrupted
game was not won by my goal nor forfeited
by the adult responsible but disqualified.
In the heat of the moment, we sued no one,
and not one person lost their job. And since,
each word of every song from that album
has stayed with me as sharp in my ears
as the pin yanked from the joint as if it were
a grenade without any anesthesia, assured
as I was by the doctors who finally released
me that I wouldn’t feel any pain in the heat
of that moment. But forty years later, I do,
how I do, oh I still fucking do.
Palindromic Duplex for Disorders of the Factitious
I hold my secret illness, a sorrow
I can’t cure. Symptoms are accusations.
I can’t cure myself of accusatory symptoms.
They come and go like neighbors, walking dogs.
Neighbors come and go. They walk away. Those dogs.
No one wants to talk for long these days.
No one wants to talk to me. Oh, these long days.
It’s as if they can see my brain’s fault lines.
My brain has a fault line that can’t be crossed.
One side won’t speak to the other. We feud.
When one side won’t speak to the other, it’s futile
to expect any reconciliation.
I don’t expect any reconciliation of
this illness I hold. It’s no secret. Is this sorrow?
Jen Karetnick is the author of 12 collections of poetry, including Inheritance with a High Error Rate (January 2024), winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award, and semifinalist for the PSV 2025 North American Book Awards. Forthcoming books include What Forges Us Steel: The Judge Judy Poems (Alternating Current Press, 2025) and Domiciliary (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2026). The cofounder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has recent or forthcoming work in Cimarron Review, NELLE, Pleiades, Plume, Seneca Review, Shenandoah, Sixth Finch, swamp pink, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. See jkaretnick.com.
