Katie Hartsock
The I Wish It Would Rain But That Song’s Been Written Motel
Tremors is on TBS again; Kevin Bacon fights mutant worms.
A rip in the drawn curtains shows the afternoon
spending itself outside; sunshine through the trees, a warm
breeze lifting all light things. Kevin Bacon orders the whole town
to stay home, kill the generators, climb high, and keep still
with zipped lips: they hunt, he reckons, by sound and motion.
He’ll wait atop the water tower with plenty’a ammo.
He’ll beat these freaks. No matter what, don’t move a muscle.
N67: Stella Maris
You came to be undone,
historian of light,
by your histories.
To pile cuts of turf
and bricks of tea,
ignite the cottage stoves.
To walk the coastal road
whose edge refused
to be fulfilled by any will.
As if something worshipful
can be pronounced
by rituals of loneliness
that do not end in solitude.
Off-season guest
of a seaside town,
the boarded-up arcades
and beach gazebos peeling paint
made an initiate of you.
The Let’s Have a Cigarette and Assess the Situation Extended Stay Motel
In order to assess the situation,
a good wall is necessary
for strategic leaning
and contemplative exhales
cast in smoke.
Across the state highway,
the strip mall sits for sale,
its parking lot lamps
empty umbrellas of spit and shine.
In this dead of the country
night, a passing trucker
shifts gears to meet a hill
where the pavement looks to end,
and the outline of his hat rim,
its rope trim as he drives by,
is too much a detail
of a separate consciousness.
Out of the soft turnpike din,
an exotic bird squawks
as though being mercilessly
mated or killed
in the stand of skinny trees
by the closed Kum N’ Go,
but it could be a trap,
a maniac with a recorder,
a brigand baiting the curious.
Neither 24-hour drive-thrus
will serve pedestrians.
Very few walls are no good
for leaning on.
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Katie Hartsock grew up around Youngstown, Ohio, and earned a MFA from the University of Michigan, where she received the major Hopwood award in poetry. She currently lives in Chicago and is a doctoral candidate at Northwestern University in the program for Comparative Literary Studies.