by Jen Karetnick
I. The Gonif
With a line from Imtiaz Dharker
Willing to fall for the trick that tells the truth,
we trick ourselves to forget. But you are a thorn
in the foot of memory—trickster born
on Christmas Day, a trick played on your moth-
er, whose water trickled out during a blizzard,
snowstorm that performs tricks as if on a skateboard,
spinning, rising and falling over a tricky curb.
At the hospital, she was tricked into believing the hard
stuff won’t come down for hours. First of a hat trick,
you were the trickiest to raise—a bored brilliance
tricking you into deconstructing electronics,
wiring your doorknob to shock intruders, a trick
only funny in the retelling. We could never out-trick you,
or the tricked-out pistol, the hammer, the follow-through.
III. The Gonif at Seder
After C.D. Wright
We pulled out the chairs
only to find them all tied
together, a family in lockstep.
We lifted knives and forks
from the paper tablecloth,
the tape he’d placed over
them, tearing trails.
We poured wine into cups
he’d punched holes into
the way my kids did
with shoeboxes to make cameras.
Above us, my son’s favorite
shoes hung from the rafters
like those slung over electric
lines, marking a meeting place,
looking down on a red sea that,
once spilled, could neither split
nor come back together.
::
A 2024 National Poetry Series finalist, Jen Karetnick is the author of 13 collections of poetry, including Inheritance with a High Error Rate (January 2024), winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award and semi-finalist for the PSV 2025 North American Book Awards. Forthcoming books include What Forges Us Steel: The Judge Judy Poems (Alternating Current Press, 2025); Domiciliary (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2026); and Organ Language (Lit Fox Books, 2026). The co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has recent or forthcoming work in Plume, Seneca Review, Shenandoah, Sixth Finch, swamp pink, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. See jkaretnick.com.
Image: Kitty Hutchinson
ID: Sneakers hung on a telephone wire with a blue sky.
Psaltery & Lyre 