Insects

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

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.

Canceling Adult Swim

Lodged under the ledge of the pool, the lizard hangs out
like a woman in the Seventies breaking from her mahjong game,

a full-skirted bathing suit floating behind her like a still-leafed
branch, cracked foundation of a face tilted toward the noon sun

in misguided worship. It has left me a gift of fibrous feces on
the deck, shit it also drops on my car from the live oaks above it,

dying habitat elsewhere but not here in this preserve where we replant
orange trees to attract endangered species, allow the weed-embedded

lawn to overgrow for less visibility, more skulking silver foxes
that no one believes still live here. “I didn’t know they could

fucking swim!” a friend comments when I post a video of this
iguana invading my lens, the domesticity in its wide, chemical wake.

Searching for the Florida Panther, I Find Only Signs  

Catamount. Cougar. Mountain lion
of the prairie, subspecies of the puma.
Prowler, predator, killer of dormant
cattle chewing on hay reaped from
the rough soil fertilized by ancient

oysters. Taker of tiny dogs who have
wandered too far from ranch houses
stretched on limestone foundations,
who have always traveled in the seats
of a manufactured way of life. I lay

all the names I’ve been told to fear
on my tongue like paint, thick and dry
as if improperly stored, the animal
I long to hold up at the other end of
a cell phone camera or capture safely

in the rearview mirror of my car. Raw
umber ghosts of the hammocks coming
back to growth after a fire, they offer
no gifts aside from scat and shadow.
Rumor and innuendo. And this framing

of their forms en plein air, stamped as if
in charcoal on cautionary metal, staked
every few miles on the shoulder of
a highway gripping the River of Grass
with the invisible tentacles of canvas.

Jen Karetnick's fourth full-length book is The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, September 2020), a CIPA EVVY winner, an Eric Hoffer Poetry Category Finalist, and a Kops Fetherling Honorable Mention. She is also the author of Hunger Until It's Pain (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming spring 2023). Co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has pieces forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Crab Creek Review, Cutthroat, DIAGRAM, Notre Dame Review, The Penn Review, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. Based in Miami, she works as a restaurant critic, lifestyle journalist, and author of four cookbooks, four guidebooks, and more. See jkaretnick.com.

Published January 30 2022