Jen Karetnick

The Opossum Is a Marsupial

zombie, stumbling under the slog of sun, stealthy in spirit with the moon. We never
minded them nesting under the deck or snoozing in the mondo grass even though

we sometimes had to wrest them from our dogs, stiff and drooling the way they
are when scared, bowels emptied, eyes and mouth open as a contemporary floorplan,

the tonic immobility as complete as it is involuntary. Still, we made a mistake in the recent
past. Believing one truly dead, we grabbed her tangle of babies from her pouch, despite

knowing we would have to raise this cluster of snouts on ticks and palmetto bugs. But
post-removal, hours later, she was gone. Possums can be injured, bones broken, in this

dreaming state. But we only stole what was rightfully hers, our hands in her insensate womb,
generation of liberators signaling virtue, rescuing what had been doing fine without us.

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Jen Karetnick's fourth full-length book is The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, September 2020). She is also the author of Hunger Until It's Pain (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming spring 2023); The Treasures That Prevail (Whitepoint Press, September 2016), finalist for the 2017 Poetry Society of Virginia Book Prize; and the chapbook The Crossing Over (March 2019), winner of the 2018 Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition, in addition to six other collections. Karetnick has won the Tiferet Writing Contest for Poetry, the Hart Crane Memorial Prize, and the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, among others, and has been an Artist in Residence in the Everglades, a Deering Estate Artist in Residence, and a Maryland Purple Line Transit grant recipient. Co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has work appearing recently in Barrow Street, The Comstock Review, december, Michigan Quarterly Review, Terrain.org and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter @Kavetchnik and Instagram @JenKaretnick, or see jkaretnick.com.