Katie Hartsock

Katie Hartsock’s second poetry collection, Wolf Trees (Able Muse Press), was listed as one of Kirkus Review’s Best Indie Books of 2023. Her work has recently appeared in the Threepenny Review, Oxford Poetry, Plume, The New Criterion, Tupelo Quarterly, Image, Literary Matters, and elsewhere. Originally from Youngstown, Ohio, she teaches at Oakland University in Michigan.

Memory and Her Beautiful Hair

Hesiod tells it twice, how Zeus heads for the foothills
to go to bed with Memory for nine successive nights,
hot with an embodiment that made the Muses

bosses. Invoking the daughters who love beginnings
as their own, he sings their conception, many generations
after conceiving began, then starts his poem,

a catalogue of births out of nothingness. Eventually he lists
their parents again, and you had to remind yourself why
it felt familiar, this return to their coupling, the first time

he calls her kallikomē — Memory of the beautiful hair.
the epithet made you weep. Because it grows, it grows,
it grows, and then it must be cut, reshaped, and swept

into a dustpan, then a trash can, and as you watch
you think, Was it ever really mine?
Last week your mother had to lose her hair. You remember

a picture of her in the local paper, at a PTA meeting,
her curls floating off the page like lily pads
in violet-dark pools, by the banks where all nine

sisters step in time, frogs dancing at their toes, muddy
with mist. They walk by night and they will not let you
ask how this story ends. How you sensed it coming

a thousand lines ago. How you kept driving east
to the coast, your sons in car seats singing Chantilly Lace,
and a pretty face, and a ponytail hanging down. How you put it

where Memory’s daughters cannot go: out of your mind.