Beachcombing

What you find depends on what
you want to find: Driftwood, sea glass,
teeth from sharks—lost weekly
as new ones rally forward from
the back, forcing others out
like the last remnants of an outgoing
year—recognized by their triangular
gleam, fossilized into sunset shades
by mineralization or white as the wake.
Spiral shells, those exoskeletons minus
their creatures. Or objects lost by others
who snapped them with clinging sand
from towels. To scour for these oceanic
souvenirs, there is no cost but the energy
you spend sieving in the intertidal zone
along with egrets looking for breakfast,
or sifting the deeper crystallization
closer to the dunes where the seagrasses
weave their equations in the air.
The evidence your fingers and feet
leave behind is temporary, scattered
impressions erased by the tide,
that nocturnal ritual that also brings in
a replacement batch of plunder to search.

*

Men from the Future Tell Julia to Smile
          After Julia’s Garden Party

          “In the photos that survive of her, Julia Tuttle looks
          stern and unsmiling, a long dark dress buttoned up to her neck,
          priestlike, often with the frowning expression of a mother
          disapproving of a daughter’s suitor.

          — Eric Barton, Flamingo, September 9, 2024

What do modern men know of
the Victorian era’s
rules for mourning dress, two years
of widow’s weeds, bombazine
suffocation of women’s
bodies in black so dark it
doesn’t reflect, midnight gloves,

boots, and crepe hats, the buttons
and buckles as lusterless
as a just-frozen pond
not yet sturdy enough to
blade on with ice skates,
mandatory even for
those whose husbands were worth less

than they should have been, or those
who were wealthy only in
meanness? What do modern men
know about powder ground from
burnt eggshells, chalk, sand, and salt,
that scrub free from teeth the plaque
but also the enamel?

About the incisors and
molars that decay surely
as plants in this swamp, tannic,
hidden by closed mouths? About
Lucy Hobbs Taylor, the first
female to graduate from
dental school in my native

Ohio, and before her
how male dentists pulled women’s
teeth before their weddings as
gifts to husbands, to replace
with a set of porcelain
dentures that rattle in mouths
like teacups on saucers? Or

the modes we take from other
arts like portraiture, where saints
are the only subjects who
are permitted a faint tip
of lips? The infrequency
of expensive images,
and how imprecise shutters

capture a scene that perhaps
isn’t intended? In one
“surviving” photograph of
my garden party, three of
us sit on the grass, five on
chairs and, in the back row, ten
stand in front of coconut

palm fronds that droop like our veils.
No one smiles; few even look
at the camera. Despite
the weather, we all wear clothes
that cover us from foot to
neck, shoulder to wrist, as if
in insensible denial.

*

Evaporating Villanelle for this Time of Life

I champion no term for the era I’m in now.
My friends introduce me as
the empty nester, as if they wonder how

their claim might ever be permitted to grow.
I lend the illusion of autonomous,
the champion of terms for the era I’m in now.

But grandsons or -daughters
might be pending soon enough—
the empty nester has to shoulder

a plan that’s much larger
than their own purpose.
I champion no term

to scan onto this turn
of decade, this age-sauce
an empty nester pours on—

so permanent
it masquerades
the empty
I champion.

*

A 2024 National Poetry Series finalist, Jen Karetnick is the author of 12 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) 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, Wildacres Retreat, Mother’s Milk Artist Residency, Centrum, Artists in Residence in the Everglades, Miami-Dade Artist Access, and elsewhere. The co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has recent or forthcoming work in Cimarron Review, NELLE, Pleiades, Plume, Shenandoah, Sixth Finch, South Dakota Review, swamp pink, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. See jkaretnick.com.