Jen Karetnick

A Nocturne for Challah

When zephyrs begin to jerk the indigo
from the ragged hem of night,
Xeroxing every vast square of dye
until they all waft together, laser your

waning attention on sifting out flour
like negative qualities. Add sugar, zest of
moonbeams, and tablespoons of salt to gleam
it into existence. Make sure yeast jacks up

the dough like blunted tires, just rubbery
enough, pungent whiff of ozone, froth of
rising in one hour to be quelled, the proofing
smooth with olive oil, sleek with the exit of weight.

Keep it covered against cats who exist
to eat what’s inappropriate—jump rings of
bananas, shopping bags—whose hearty appetites
can’t be quenched. Abuzz with tikkun,

punch down, each fist making an amendment
in the fabric of faith. Acquire a woman
needy of this mitzvah: The favor of burning
the un-joined piece of dough. Then examine

her life: Did she discover her spouse? Find
fertility? Excuse herself from injurious
felines? Every week, these brisk petitions
to right inequities cozy up to eggs, poppy

seeds, lukewarm water, all parts ersatz poems
or prayers, equally symbolic, bonded to so many
women’s voices speaking bread into being,
exacting injunctions from plump, golden weaves.

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The winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award for Inheritance with a High Error Rate (forthcoming), Jen Karetnick is the author of 10 additional poetry collections, including the chapbook, What Forges Us Steel: The Judge Judy Poems (Alternating Current Press, forthcoming) 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, Artists in Residence in the Everglades, the Deering Estate, Maryland Transit Administration 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 Day, Notre Dame Review, The Penn Review, Ruminate, South Dakota Review and Tar River Poetry. See jkaretnick.com.