Watching Actors Born in the 21st Century Sit Down to Write Letters in Period Pieces

Watching Actors Born in the 21st Century

Sit Down to Write Letters in Period Pieces

Katie Hartsock

Some look as if they over-practiced
pausing to press the pen to their lips,
as if they find the very face
of this composing wearisome.
Others imagine their bodies renewed,
rejoined, by the old lone posture—they lean
to become the rolltop desk, to draft
inside the unelectronic
proportions of their electric limbs.
They even feign the soreness of wrists
well-turned with cursive, the backaches tense
with situation, a sudden thirst.
We can believe they’ve never heard
delete as a key, as a command
that eats whole sentences, which they scrawl
quickly, if they must rush to make
the afternoon post. Or, slowly, if
they must wait a while anyway,
in some more distant century,
for nightfall, when they can draw near
the city gates undetected,
ink dried out for hours on the scroll
a little wilted in their hand, hot
with nerves, in a time before pockets.

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Katie Hartsock
Poet

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 or is forthcoming in Threepenny Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Image, RHINO, The New Criterion, Dappled Things, Literary Matters, Classical Outlook, New Verse Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Originally from Youngstown, Ohio, she teaches at Oakland University in Michigan, and lives in Ann Arbor with her husband and sons.

Photography by Patrick Reichboth