Yeast

            A beautiful outlaw ghazal

Opportunistic engine of infection, budding plasma of bread. You inject the bubbles
in booze, convert a quaff of carbon dioxide into beer. You live in camps like our own bubbles.

Colonizing stomachs of pollinators, filling a floral ovary, surviving as brisk, toxic wafts
of air, you play an unjust god to quaint forms of animation. You gas up human guts, bubbling.

You pickle veggies. You survive every environment, producing your own helpful
enzymes: extrusions to success. Your jurisprudence is extreme. You don’t require bubbles

even though you make them—extrajudicial byproduct, maybe—your influence azimuth.
It won’t be the meek who inherit the quarantined earth, reduced to a climate-damaged bubble

like a squeaking balloon. Or a freak cockroach. Or even a jackhammering virus. You will:
Candida. Saccharomyces. Leucosporidium. Puzzle pieces, assembled in your asexual bubble.

Jen Karetnick’s fourth full-length book is The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, September 2020), a CIPA EVVY winner, an Eric Hoffer Poetry Category Finalist, and a Kops Fetherling Honorable Mention. She is also the author of Hunger Until It’s Pain (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming spring 2023). Long-listed for the international 2021 Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize, a finalist for the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize, the 2021 Sweet: Lit Poetry Contest, the 2021 and 2020 Joy Harjo Poetry Contest, and recipient of a Merit Award in the Atlanta Review 2021 International Poetry Competition, 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. Co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has had work recently or forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Crab Creek Review, Cutthroat, DIAGRAM, Jet Fuel Review, Notre Dame Review, The Penn Review, Ruminate, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. See jkaretnick.com.