This selection, chosen by guest editor john compton, is from Inheritance with a High Error Rate by Jen Karetnick (Cider Press Review 2024).
Rooster Blues
The just-hatched chicks were let loose as favors.
Barely dry, they were let loose like favors,
a flavicomous cloud dropped among toddlers.
The birthday boy picked them up and held them.
The party guests picked them up and crushed them.
They forgot about the “pet” in petting farm.
We gathered the chicks in a cowboy hat.
Collected chicks in the well of a straw hat,
and took four of them home to make them fat.
We shouldn’t have named them after cousins.
We learned never to name birds after cousins.
Ben didn’t make it; the others mashed him.
The three grew an aubade of combs: All roosters.
And took to the stew pot our dream of brooders.
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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