The Sister Karamazov
For David
All things that occur in fours
have a fifth, a conspirator
unbeknownst to the conspiracy,
and ignored by the narrator.
A bastard season of a sister
who borrows the defining features
of her brothers: the cynic,
the sensualist, the wretch
the mystic. Without her,
they cannot become each other.
An onlooker, she remains unintroduced
at a distance—across a potato cart
at market, a few stools down the bar,
pausing by the picture windows
of their quarters, on her knees and forehead
in a mass of peasants at the monastery—
fiercely adoring all four
now that they're all in town, not for long.
She wanders through them as she would a forest
and sees herself, a tree that grows there.
There are nights all five
roam the streets alone,
inquisitors born from a father
who cannot answer for anything.
The brothers turn disparate
corners, unaware, towards her:
the wheel around spokes,
the deck's forlorn joker,
apocryphal gospel,
quintessential wind.
Any direction steers her closer
to one brother and farther from another,
and farther from one brother and
closer to another.
Copyright Credit: Katie Hartsock, "The Sister Karamazov" from Bed of Impatiens. Copyright © 2016 by Katie Hartsock. Reprinted by permission of Able Muse Press.
Source: Bed of Impatiens (Able Muse Press)