BY Jen Karetnick

Over the Australian pine, the Dutch pipe vine lattices.

Our backs ripen with humidity as we guide and prune it,

heads trickling the briny tint left by trapezius industry.

The vegetation doesn’t know that we, too, are invasive, winged

outflow of northeasterners making improvements

of a different nature. A colony of caterpillars has also

disturbed the leaves, the flowers that lick moisture from

air with their wide, floppy tongues. The word “carpetbaggers”

is no longer in vogue. But while we can pretend to be

almost symbiotic, we are parasites, laying eggs. The truth is

visual and fleeting, our flight painted by our ingested hosts.

Jen Karetnick's fourth full-length book is The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, September 2020), an Eric Hoffer Poetry Category Finalist and a Kops-Fetherling Honorable Mention. Co-founder/managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has work forthcoming in The Comstock Review, Matter, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. See jkaretnick.com.