Jen Karetnick
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Shelter of Lies
                 After "Shadow Puppet Theater" by Johanna Altmann
 
 
This is the yellow scrapbook that you began the year I was born
the way one would dig into a planet and forget the word light.
 
Let us consider the view. Carved and dressed up like puppets,
the dancers leap and catch into the sheet, into the roofbeam,
 
into the dumb prayer. The architecture of the sky with eagles, finches,
flickers, seagulls. Flying dogs or the breath of dolphins. Each mouth
 
opens wide as a milk cup, waiting like a cave of bees, as uninvolved
as warm starfish. You stand in your elastic case, the survivor bulging
 
with life. Your flames still bite my thigh, the shadow marks my bone.
Sweet weight, who inked you in? All night dark wings flopping in my heart.
 
 
 
An Anne Sexton ekocento
Source poems:
“All My Pretty Ones;” “Crossing the Atlantic;” “From the garden;” “Wallflower;” “The Ambition Bird;” “The Double Image;” “Her Kind;” “Ke 6-8018;” “Sylvia’s Death;” “Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound;” “O Ye Tongues;” “The Room of My Life;” “Woman with Girdle;” “The House” Menstruation at Forty;” “Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward;” “In Celebration of My Uterus”
 


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A 2024 National Poetry Series finalist, Jen Karetnick is the author of 11 collections of poetry, including Inheritance with a High Error Rate (January 2024), the winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award. Her work has won the Sweet: Lit Poetry Prize, Tiferet Writing Contest for Poetry, Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition, Hart Crane Memorial Prize, and Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, among other honors, and received support from the Vermont Studio Center, Roundhouse Foundation, Wassaic Projects, Write On, Door County, 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 Cimarron Review, NELLE, Pleiades, Plume, Shenandoah, Sixth Finch, South Dakota Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere.