Jen Karetnick, Inheritance with a High Error Rate

I Live at Ground Zero of the Climate Exodus;

Or, How to Sell a Waterfront Home in Miami

With every king tide the land loosens a little more

around me, a floral caftan to wear after surgery.

Underground, the concrete walls of the houses spall,

crackling like cellophane. The iguanas seem strong

now, flexing their tails and shitting in pools with typical

arrogance, far more equipped to survive than I am,

but one day they will be cut off from the mainland,

the distances too far to swim, the woolly mammoths

of the millennial generation. Left to inbreed, their genes

will become asteroids of their ancestors’ making.

It’s too late for the maybe-someday, the if-or-when day.

Even the least honest Realtors acknowledge where not

to buy, if you’re local, know which communities are

a harder sell—these they peddle to half-timers who can

afford to have no wind insurance or worry, who private

jet away from storms into the peace of other primary

residences, where peacocks don’t stalk the roads, chevroned

by dried saline, attracted to the fish and frogs left behind

when the water recedes like a hairline, leaving its prickly

evidence of once-was. This is how it is to long for something

I haven’t even left yet, steeped in nostalgia like old tea

leaves that have barely any hue and even less future to give,

like the beaches here, bony under mounds of the sargassum

smothering the sea turtles, the crabs and lobsters. Oh, the static,

interstitial species. How they, too, can’t obey the logic to go

when the draw is so magnetic to stay. Still, I plug the address

of every available house into the FEMA Flood Map Service Center,

bury Saint Joseph upside-down near the ‘For Sale” sign, pray that

his discomfort in the dark will lead me to some kind of light—homes

built on natural oolite ridges or manufactured rises, complete with

impact windows and hurricane-proof doors—and every day watch

the statue’s feet get washed by the mother who is all of our toxic

mothers, protrude a little more from the eroding ground, leaning

inland, inland, inland, where we will both be reborn as eventuality.

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