Jen Karetnick

Instantly hypothermic the way peas frozen
with dry ice are or feet dipped into a winter lake,
my son’s kidney looked exactly as I expected:
chilled fist of preserved life, gobbed with yellow fat

here and there, like something I’d pull from a hen
to replace with cubed bread stuffing and then bake.
I hadn’t known the surgery would be streamed
to our phones, that I’d see inside my child in a way that

most surgeons usually did, but probably no parent
ever should. One year later this November, it’s a take
that still leaves me raw: two young men side by side,
the organ transplant hush-slush machine a vat

of salinated, silently held energy between them,
one about to be scalpeled open, the other’s rake
of incisions being cinched together and stapled,
leaving caretakers to watch over the moving shots.