“A 67-year-old US man is still alive more than six months after receiving a kidney from a genetically modified pig. This is the longest a pig organ has survived in a living person.”
–Nature, 9/8/25
The xenotransplantation border has been crossed almost as easily from Niagara Falls to
Canada, it seems. I don’t know why this medical milestone makes me think of
geese being force-fed to level up their livers into a more spreadable fat to
pair with Sauternes. And it’s not as if the doctors just take the first available kidneys
off any old swine. First, the genes must be edited like sentences, deadly viruses
in-activated. The recipient treated with antibodies as experimental as poetry.
The fuse of arteries and veins, the organ pinking up like cheeks to flood the dry
creek of ureter—similar to human, though the pig kidney is shrunk as if in a hot
wash or reckless dryer. Likewise, the former lobes are left to atrophy into peas.
Each day that the first living patients survive is history-making, a record, an-
other miracle. I send my son the initial article that breaks, which he takes
as a mock-serious, post-donation suggestion: You mean I could have kept mine?
If if if if. I hold back the info of how NYU surgeons had practiced on one brain-dead
human at a time, leaving the pig kidney in for months before pulling all the plugs.
An American sen4ence acrostic for Remy
A National Poetry Series finalist, Jen Karetnick is the author of 13 collections of poetry, including Inheritance with a High Error Rate (January 2024), winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award and semi-finalist for the PSV 2025 North American Book Awards. Forthcoming books include What Forges Us Steel: The Judge Judy Poems (Alternating Current Press, 2025); Domiciliary (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2026); and Organ Language (Lit Fox Books, 2026). Her work has won the Press 53 Poem Summer Challenge, Sweet: Lit Poetry Prize, Tiferet Writing Contest for Poetry, Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition, Hart Crane Memorial Prize, and Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, among other honors, and received support from the Artists in Residence in the Everglades, Centrum, Idyllwild Arts, Miami-Dade Artist Access, Mother’s Milk Artist Residency, Pine Meadows Ranch Center for Arts and Agriculture/Roundhouse Foundation, Stove Works, Vermont Studio Center, Wassaic Project, Wildacres Retreat, Write On, Door County, and elsewhere. Jen holds an MFA in poetry from the University of California, Irvine, and an MFA in fiction from the University of Miami. The co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has recent or forthcoming work in Cimarron Review, NELLE, Pleiades, Plume, Seneca Review, Shenandoah, Sixth Finch, swamp pink, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. See jkaretnick.com.