Zap

My spouse swoops the Koramzi “mosquito terminator”
underhand, up and over in an arc like a jump rope makes,
stunning nothing. It is only air he dislodges with
the electrocuted grid of the tennis-racket-shaped
gadget that fireflies dodge with ease. They flit
back and forth, playing a game of extreme Red Rover

from one end of the box of screened-in porch
they’ve subverted with their buzz, their quick sting,
to the other. The winter equinox is behind us now
but night’s tepid quilt still drops down from the sky
without notice. The LED pool lights bring termites,
looking for homes in which to reproduce. These injustices,

junior as they are, we must deal with this close to the equator
in exchange for year-round warmth. We live with lizards
as big as tricycles crossing the streets, staring us stationary,
boa constrictors daring us to carry out quotas with our household
machetes to shrink their frank majority. We wade floods excreting
electric dangers, unquestioning what will we have to hold our ground.

A 2024 National Poetry Series finalist, Jen Karetnick is the author of twelve collections of poetry, including Inheritance with a High Error Rate (January 2024), the winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award. Forthcoming books include What Forges Us Steel: The Judge Judy Poems (Alternating Current Press, 2025) and Domiciliary (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2026). 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, and elsewhere. The co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has recent or forthcoming work in Atlanta Review, NELLE, Pleiades, Plume, Shenandoah, Sixth Finch, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. See jkaretnick.com.

Published April 15 2025