By Jen Karetnick

an American sentence acrostic after Lucille Clifton

maybe they have become just another hungry suburban pest. By which
I also mean roosting peafowl or nesting hens of all varieties that

should not be propagating in any of these neighborhoods where we
have more machines on autopilot than people. But we have so gladly

kept up the tradition of breaking rules here. On the NextDoor app,
the trolls scream, Learn how to share the planet, to every

body who complains about Miami officials who won’t remove invasives.
I follow a thread of more than eighty comments regarding roosters,

started by a woman who is awakened every night at 3 a.m. But the pale,
slim flocks of ibises—their collective song a mild grunt—aerate soil

and eat the vexations that decimate our lawns. Of course, it’s more than
possible their help is accidental, not knowing which swamp is which anymore.


~~~

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 Cimarron Review, Plume, Seneca Review, Sixth Finch, swamp pink, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. See www.jkaretnick.com