Jen Karetnick
A 2024 National Poetry Series finalist, Jen Karetnick is the author of 13 collections of poetry, including Inheritance with a High Error Rate (January 2024), winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award and semi-finalist for the PSV 2025 North American Book Awards. Forthcoming books include What Forges Us Steel: The Judge Judy Poems (Alternating Current Press, 2025); Domiciliary (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2026); and Organ Language (Lit Fox Books, 2026). The co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has recent or forthcoming work in Pleiades, Plume, Shenandoah, Sixth Finch, swamp pink, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. See jkaretnick.com.
For Zoe and Remy
Note: The title and first line come from a survey performed by Marriott Resorts in advance of National
Piña Colada Day.
36 Percent of Adults Count
a piña colada as their daily fruit intake
while on vacation and we were no different,
anchored off the coast of Cartagena
while on a tour of the Rosario Islands
to snorkel and drink from the mouth
of a bottle of diluted rum along with
the other guests as if none of us had ever
heard of disease. On each side of the boat,
boys balanced astride buttery plastic
kayaks as if on horseback. They cored
dethroned pineapples, sliced the flesh into
oozing golden rings to hook onto the top
of the rind after they frothed the cocktail
mixture into whitecaps. At home, I forego this
fruit, its microscopic spikes of calcium oxalate—
the same substance as kidney stones—
and mouth-burning bromelain combining
to ulcerate my tongue so completely it takes
days to heal. I leave it at the market with
the grapefruit and cranberries and grapes
that interfere with the medications reducing
cholesterol and lowering blood pressure
and breaking up clots. But we’d just explored
the abandoned Fort of San Fernando de Bocachica
on Tierrabomba, so sparsely populated
its best restaurant is a stand under a tree,
learning how the soldiers braided maps
into their hair and why the rising water
in the cistern foretold the advance of
foreign ships, in a heat so radiant the waves
chalked their bodies onto the flagstones,
humidity pulping the juice from ours.
Bobbing on the ocean with my newly
adult kids, all of us hoisting pineapples
to toast the day, I found those plump
little suns filled with so much cool
and cream and gold, nothing left could sting.
