are extra food, we local women post every chance we get,
a shroud of swallows and thrushes around us as we jog
around the block at dusk. Sprays equal death. We would
make every tanager and grosbeak a gazpacho of flea and
mosquito if we could, force-feed them a ubiquitous
saveur of midges to go with beakfuls of extracted berries.
We judge, we jury those who hold biohazardous bottles over
grapefruit or key limes, we pluck the caterpillars from trees
too juvenile to meet the appetite of a hoard in order to recolonize
another inadequate backyard, though we know it can be difficult
to identify, exactly, what you’re encouraged to cultivate when
you’re both weight and gauge. Nurture the butterfly. Egg on
on a dragonfly, buoy up ladybugs. But plant-juicing thrips?
Jovial swarms of gnats? Quintuplicating ants? All sacrificial,
whiz-banging into flocks murmurating with such abrupt, judicious
turns you can’t do anything but watch, struck by axial snacks
taken on the wing. The passerine head to points south, south
even of here where hundreds of thousands of Texans and New
Yorkers journeyed to find real estate with a water view during
quarantine. Life-size migration, a steady V, hardly as quaint
as dark-eyed juncos choosing our lawns for a meal of army worms
and wasps, a chorus of approval, and a doze. Snowbirds place
feeders on live oak limbs, surprised when colossal iguanas gulp
every goody and crawl Biscayne’s bisque-like bay, when foxes
jump out from the undergrowth to eat the kibble left for the cat,
when even an acequia can hold an alligator. Amazing, they murmur,
then fertilize the yard and buy an extended warranty. We warn them:
We are bellyful, we are melody-ready, we are equipped for the haul.
This poem first appeared in The Dodge.
—
Jen Karetnick has authored 11 poetry collections, including Inheritance with a High Error Rate (January 2024), winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award. Her work has won the Sweet: Lit Poetry Prize, Tiferet Writing Contest for Poetry, Hart Crane Memorial Prize, and Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, among other honors, and received support from the Vermont Studio Center, Artists in Residence in the Everglades, Roundhouse Foundation, and elsewhere. She co-founded SWWIM. See jkaretnick.com.
