Admit that it was just once, three days
before graduation, by a cop who was in
the high school class two years ahead of you.
You suspected it wasn’t smart to park in
the cul-de-sac where they were building
houses the size of small theme parks, to bring
along the quarter ounce of weed and the bong,
the six friends, only one of whom, like you,
was officially an adult and who could be
identified in the town paper (still archived
on microfiche in the library). But you needed
to learn and you did. You learned phrases like
“released on your own recognizance”
as if they were lines of poems to be
memorized. You learned that attorneys
can argue how a search must have been illegal
if you’re white and your future looks gold,
how a record can be expunged so that you, too,
could practice law someday if you wanted, although
it was only your mother who wanted. You learned
the mercurial temperature of shame, a fever
never quite peaking, never breaking. After,
you learned how long it would take for your father
to stop asking if you’d also shot up heroin; decades
later, you learned how your brother would tell
your young children about it over dinner one night,
his voice as casual as a pair of jeans. You learned
“expunged” means your file still exists but only
government officials would be able to see it,
like those in airports who can allow or deny you
entry as if you were an emotional support animal.
When you became an educator, you learned that
county school boards don’t have the same authority,
but that inking your fingertips into CSI outlines
gives you flashbacks like the haze around streetlights
on humid nights or the aura of migraines that occur
on the left side of your vision, for which you’re
prescribed medical marijuana when everything else
fails. At the dispensary, young men with beards
as wild as freedom demonstrate vape pens
and cartridges, explain the differences between
plastic and ceramic, between sativa and indica,
litanies they repeat as prayers in voices just short
of religion, recommending Super Sour Diesel
for appetite and Gorilla Glue for sleep and pain
relief. You knew cash was still and always the preferred
method for transactions, but otherwise you let
them cater to what they think they see: the brittle
crunch and shrink of an age filled with payback
that they believe they are never going to reach.
Jen Karetnick is the author of ten poetry collections, including Hunger Until It's Pain (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming spring 2023); The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, forthcoming August 2020); The Crossing Over (March 2019), winner of the 2018 Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition; and The Treasures That Prevail (Whitepoint Press, September 2016), finalist for the 2017 Poetry Society of Virginia Book Prize. Her poems have been awarded the Hart Crane Memorial Prize, the Romeo Lemay Poetry Prize, the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, and two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes, among others. Her work appears recently or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, The Comstock Review, december, Michigan Quarterly Review, Terrain, and elsewhere. Co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, Jen received an MFA in poetry from University of California, Irvine, and an MFA in fiction from University of Miami. She is currently a Deering Estate Artist-in-Residence in playwriting. Find her on Twitter @Kavetchnik and Instagram @JenKaretnick, or see jkaretnick.com.