This selection, chosen by guest editor john compton, is from Inheritance with a High Error Rate by Jen Karetnick (Cider Press Review 2024).
The Nature of Nurture
At dusk, the screech owls warn us with a bounce
of song that we’ve come too near the recesses
they’ve accessed, their found nests, in the live oaks.
They target heads—ours, and the dogs we walk.
We wear bright-brimmed hats, neon the collars
of the animals, brighten cell phone
screens to announce our presence. But such small,
otherworldly suns fool just a few. One
night, a fly-by swooping cranes us upward.
We find an owl, melting into her
tiled backsplash of brown, beige, and dun,
guarding a duckling?—yes, a wood duckling,
tiny crest of head beginning to green,
peeking out from behind the bird who warmed
a rogue egg enough to hatch it. But he hears
the slide whistle of his mother along
the canal and jumps from the limb to land
unharmed in the swale we have neglected
to trim. Even the dogs pause as he runs
to his kin. Only the owl now fills the space.
Feathering her hollow. Settling. Settling.
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), 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 Project, Write On, Door County, Wildacres Retreat, Mother’s Milk Artist Residency, Centrum, 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 Atlanta Review, Cimarron Review, NELLE, Pleiades, Plume, Shenandoah, Sixth Finch, Verse Daily, and elsewhere.
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