Landscape, with Hibernation

Landscape, with Hibernation Jen Karetnick (bio) Landscape, with Hibernation Separating like cream, chunks of snow thunk to the ground from roofs of houses and trees that still have their leaves. The storm was earlier and stronger than expected, catching her unaware. It is difficult to shake the weight of it. For two weeks, she sees only humans. Not a squirrel or bird or fish in the river, although she knows it wells with bass, black crappie, brown trout. Her mother asks, again, what art she wants of hers. For after. She wants to label it. The weather gives her no choice but to let matters rest. Like her mother, the urge to root. In winter, death is the only why one digs. Dig? ________ Plant plants to come back yearly next to a grave stone: End Page 228 Hosta. Hardy geraniums. Her mother doesn't remember the item she names. Thirteen inches of snow equals one inch of rain. A burying there. Relief elsewhere. She has forgotten how winter empties the land like a glass of its beverage, bends the sky into a board unpierced by the darts of birds. She thinks about benign neglect. How impossible to undo, like removing plaque from the brain. Into this terrain, a raft of mallard ducks paddles into view, riding the river downstream. The moving, living current. End Page 229 Jen Karetnick The winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award for Inheritance with a High Error Rate (January 2024), Jen Karetnick is the author of ten additional poetry collections. 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 others, and received support from Vermont Studio Center, Wildacres Retreat, Mother's Milk Artist Residency, Artists in Residence in the Everglades, and elsewhere. The co-founder/managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has forthcoming work in Atlanta Review, Cimarron Review, Plume, Shenandoah, and South Dakota Review. See jkaretnick. com. Copyright © 2024 Pleiades and Pleiades Press