The eyes wide or weightywith it. The full boator low tide of it.The leopard of itwhen it leaps. Nervousbefore a sermon, Saint Bernardprayed for help and the Virgin appeared,babe in lap, to squirt him in the eyewith a wondrous scream of it,thus gifting him with eloquence.The sun-white glow of itin dimmed-down roomsacross galaxies, galaxies, galaxies.The Romans admired a motherwho visited her father, sentencedto starve to death, in prison,and kept him alive with it,secretly. The leopardof it when it leaps.Ten children my great-grandmothernursed, from one breast—the other side never made, maybe,a country doctor thought,because of her childhood polio.The creation ex nihilo of it,across the galaxy’s pale cream.In a short story by Maupassant,a train is stopped far from anywhereand one car holds two strangers,a very hungry man and a nursemaid,painfully engorged. And that’s allyou really need to know,except, it occurs to me, shemust have been hungry too.
Breast Milk
Feature Date
- November 23, 2024
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“Breast Milk” by Katie Hartsock, from Wolf Trees (Able Muse Press, 2023). Used with permission.
Katie Hartsock’s second poetry collection, Wolf Trees, was listed as one of Kirkus Review‘s Best Indie Books of 2023. Her work has appeared in journals such as Threepenny Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Image, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, and RHINO, and is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Classical Outlook, At Length, and elsewhere. She is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Oakland University in Michigan.
"Expanding from breast milk, stretch marks, and memories of miniskirts to the Farnese Hercules, the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, and, beautifully, in 'The Nipple Shield of Achilles,' to the Iliad, Katie Hartsock’s urgent and capacious poems contain multitudes. In unexpected and compelling ways, many of these poems reach from an intimate focus to the realm of myth and legend. Hartsock’s vision makes her poems ramify like the archetypal tree of her title—shape-shifting, endlessly generative, and radiant with meaning."
—Rachel Hadas, author of Love and Dread and Piece by Piece
"Katie Hartsock is one wonderful poet. She is the abundantly gifted, skilled, and generous keeper of world myths who is constantly cleaning, repairing, and representing ancient wisdom to us as new salve and fresh cure for the world as it is right now. Wolf Trees is a gorgeous gathering of poems from one of America's brightest poetic voices."
—Lorna Goodison, author of Collected Poems and Supplying Salt and Light
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