Hair changes colour in this poem, and so does everything else. Each stanza is a new life in which the speaker meets the same beloved, and the beloved is recognisable only by a hair colour that keeps shifting: blonde, brunette, red, black. The poem reads as a catalogue of ways one love can hurt. It begins with unreturned affection, moves through sweetness that spoils, then possessive heat and emotional control, and ends in death. The central idea is that the speaker keeps being drawn back into a pattern, and that escaping it means leaving the cycle itself, not just the person.
The second stanza shows the poem's method most clearly. Being loved back is "the sweetest thing I've ever tasted," and the speaker builds a run of cosy images around it: hot chocolate in autumn, wool gloves in the snow, a candy store in February. Every one of them carries its own ruin. As the speaker admits, "candy rots, gloves get soaked, and chocolate residue / pools at the bottom of mugs like tea leaves." The comforts were already on their way to decay, and the speaker only sees it afterwards.
The red-haired life turns that sweetness into heat. The speaker stays "because i feel responsible," and then reasons from a question that answers itself: "warmth and heat are one and the same, aren't they?" The reply, "of course," comes with another glass of wine "as dark and red as You," so the beloved and the intoxicant merge, and the lifetime passes "drunk." The black-haired life makes the control plainer. When the speaker offers to help with the roots, the beloved screams and locks the bathroom door. The speaker then paces all night, apologises "the way You taught me to," and wakes to a beloved who smiles "with all Your teeth on display, well rested and happy." Tears have been "chiseling at my heart" while the other person sleeps well. That contrast shows who pays for the apology.
Punctuation and capitalisation carry meaning here. The speaker is a lowercase "i" for most of the poem, while the beloved is a capitalised "You," as if the pronoun were a title. After the bus crash, the beloved shrinks to a lowercase "you," "squashed… like a bug." Yet the grip remains: "it's sickening the hold You still have / while decaying in the dirt beneath my feet." The capital returns in that line, which suggests that death has not lessened the power. Then comes the pun "yet i still find myself dyeing." The speaker is dyeing hair and also dying, taking on the beloved's colours: black for ashes, red for carpet stains, brown for childhood mud pies, and blonde. Even the speaker's identity has become a palette borrowed from this one person.
The blonde that ends that list opens a brief and surprising moment of freedom. The speaker finally writes a capital "I," moving on "oh so easily" in the sunshine. But the colour "didn't last very long, though; the sight of it / was sickening." The word "sickening" has now been used for the beloved's hold and for the speaker's own recovery. The poem seems to say that easy escape is suspicious. Blonde was also the colour of the first life, the one where the speaker wasn't loved back, so moving on may just bring the speaker back to the beginning.
The form suits this. The poem is free verse with no regular rhyme or metre, and its stanzas vary in length. Lines enjamb mid-thought ("but it / reminds me of past candlelit dinners") and the tone stays conversational, like confession. The last line is a single sentence set apart: "reborn, we met for the sixth first time with our hair buzzed short." "Sixth first time" is a deliberate paradox, and it hints at more lives than the poem shows. Shaved hair removes the thing that kept changing, so there is nothing left to dye. Whether that is surrender, equality, or a clean start is left open.
The title, "Ancient Artifact," points to an old object dug up again and again, which fits the beloved "decaying in the dirt." The poem's lasting force comes from taking a familiar experience, returning to a relationship that harms you, and stretching it across lifetimes until it looks inherited rather than chosen.