Jen Karetnick

Jen Karetnick is the winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award for Inheritance with a High Error Rate (January 2024), selected by Lauren Camp. Jen Karetnick is the author of 10 additional poetry collections, including the chapbook What Forges Us Steel: The Judge Judy Poems (Alternating Current Press, July 2024) and the 2021 CIPA EVVY Gold Medal winner The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, 2020). Her work has won the Tiferet Writing Contest for Poetry, Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition, Hart Crane Memorial Prize, and Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, among other honors, and received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Wildacres Retreat, Mother's Milk Artist Residency, 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 The American Poetry Review, Cold Mountain Review, Missouri Review Poem of the Week, Notre Dame Review, Shenandoah, South Dakota Review, and Tar River Poetry. See jkaretnick.com   Instagram @JenKaretnick
Twitter @Kavetchnik.
Photo Credit: Zoe Cross

Quahog (AKA the Chowder Clam)

“The untimely death of Ming the clam – the oldest living animal in the world – was no accident, it has been revealed.” https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/ming-clam-died-name-science-6308600

Algonquian arenaceousbivalve gleaned from                  coastal Atlantic interstices,  drawled with distinct vowels, itestimated climate change,  forecasting the rising oceans, havinggrown a ring for each year,                  hardening its shell the way a tree invests in itself, recording both the in-jurious and the beneficial.  King of clams, the big boss oflittle necks, alive for 507 years,                   Ming, Arctica islandica named for the Chinese dynasty,opened scientists’ eyes to how ridges pale and dilute during years ofQPX parasites and el niño seasons,                 resuming thickness when ice snaps us back into mythmaking,trails to the ocean’s edges. But useful as this was to them, itsvalue to us lay inside its inner lid, that violet                   wampum. We took only the meat, x-hatched it, and tossed it into milk(yellowed with butter) to constellate a tiny zodiac. Then devoured this temporary, simmering sea.

Jen Karetnick

Quahog (AKA the Chowder Clam)

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