Jen Karetnick
​Image by Alexander Krivitskiy from Unsplash                                                                                    

Jen Karetnick's fourth full-length book is the 2021 CIPA EVVY Gold Medal winner The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, September 2020). Forthcoming books include Hunger Until It's Pain (Salmon Poetry, spring 2023) and the chapbook What Forges Us Steel: The Judge Judy Poems (Alternating Current Press). She 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 fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Artists in Residence in the Everglades, the Deering Estate, Maryland Transit Authority, and elsewhere. Co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has had work recently or forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Another Chicago MagazineCrab Creek ReviewCutthroatDIAGRAMJet Fuel ReviewNotre Dame ReviewThe Penn ReviewRuminateTar River PoetryTerrain.org, and elsewhere. See jkaretnick.com.
Pretzel


When the endocrinologist asks if I am anorexic I think 
about how in college I would use my two obverse teeth 
to nibble the crystallized salt off the cement of a sourdough 
twist, then quietly heave it in the trash rather than let 
the sand of it, crushed and sodden, enjamb my molars.

I think about how, anxious in high school, I would skip 
weekday meals, cycle my ten-speed ten miles, make a pit 
stop at the 7-Eleven to buy a diet soda and a fat thumb 
of pickle, tongs aimed at the smallest, quick-salted cuke 
bobbing in a plastic jug the size of a wheel. About the 

Saturdays and Sundays organizing workouts to burn off 
a solo pop-top jar of baby shrimp floating in cocktail’s 
plasma zing. Sit-ups in my room. Foot always tapping in 
vivacissimo rhythms for acquiring additional caloric 
burn. Salt in, salt out—an axiom toward a calcium and

collagen reveal. How could I know my body would pare
away like a canyon as I aged, like a leg of a peninsula licked 
and chewed by waves. How carved and fixed I would become, 
landscape of immeasurable disease. Decades away, I claim 
such urges are gone, even as memories jog back. She quizzes 

me anyway on my diet. Walks me over to be re-weighed. 
Maybe the nurse was wrong, she says, then exclaims about
my BMI, juries the medications I take to maintain status quo, 
scolds me about my spongy bones, reclaimed from brine. 
She wants me to see myself through her eyes—sunken, sieved,

coral for tropical fish—failing to find my job as food critic 
ironic, insisting this quixotic knot is of my own tying. So 
again I look to snacks thought up by Italian monks, built into 
praying arms, crux of flour and fluid and salt. Or a braid, a slim 
stick, a rod, Catholic kazoo I hum any starvation through, 

thanks to Swiss immigrants who brought them to North America 
in the nineteenth century to hunt on Easter morning, proxy cadavers
for Jesus. These days it’s not my hunger that’s apparent, it’s how 
I satisfy it with wheat harvested by Midwestern combines, the grit 
and crunch I take on so brazen that no one need equate it with disorder.


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