Reading Mayakovsky in Brooklyn

It’s past one at the Bad Luck Bar. On the corner, a couple
pressed up against an iron fence. The neon light
of the convenience store windows haloes their heads.
Their mouths are frantic, their lust hungry and clean.
For once, I’m not ashamed of myself for looking—
a man, passing by, croons I know that’s right! into 
the cold April air; allegedly, it’s spring. They break apart, laughing,
this couple learning each other for perhaps the first time. 
I miss knowing someone—I don’t think that’s wrong to admit,
wanting to be wanted. But so often the dissipation—I love you,
and now I don’t. So no more of that, no more of love’s boat
taking on water. No more the crumpled bedsheets in a Bushwick
walk-up, and no waiting until 3, until 5 a.m. waiting for someone,
to tell me I deserve to be held and to say they’re not ashamed
of loving me. No waiting for the man that hungers me; I am done fighting 
sleep because I have to be. There is no world large enough to disappear
and have no one notice. I’ve tried. But tonight I must admit 
a certain kind of gentleness. The couple peels away from the corner.
They hold hands and stroll out of sight. And tonight, 
there are no stars in Brooklyn, but people still kiss in the dark.

Becoming Your Mama
	after John Murillo and Elizabeth Bishop

Throw out
the scale, then buy another.

Eat. Don’t eat. Feel bad
about your eating. 

Lose a baby. Lose two.
Rebuke your daughter

for the way she slides
into the toilet bowl in shreds

of tissue. She is not skinny enough.
Too much of herself

is in the bleeding. Rebuke
yourself for the bad men

and the worse sex. Remember:
the man who loves you

is years beyond your twenty five. 
Watch him go away. Watch him choose.  

Years later he might call
to say he chose wrong. 

Sit in silence on the other end,
wonder if you should say

you’ve waited your life away
for this. His damaged wife,

your othered woman, slinking 
in the background. 

Watch his house
flood, and do nothing. 

Swallow water. Tread lightly. 
Don’t worry: you’ve done this all your life. 

Blue Traveler

I woke up	            and everything		was blue
	   blue the bomb		gone off by the school         blue		the blackened
windows of the burnt out house			blue like the walls of the dark hospital room	   where 
for the first time I heard the sound	of my ovary, flushed 	    with blood		which
                             was so like  a heartbeat  I thought it must be one
	blue riddle of my body			blue ribbon unraveling		in my womb
I thought 	   my first baby 	    would be a boy		like my brother			I named him
	lucky 		I named him	Felix			I named him even as the dark clots
stained my blue			underwear	russet	I named him even as the blue
                    night faded	into dawn	       I shoved a hand		 between my thighs thinking I
	could keep him		if I kept him		inside me	 a little longer	  it was
blue like the hospital room with clouds painted 		on the off-	center	ceiling tiles
                       and I thought	that’s sad why		 is it so sad  
	    the doctor saw my face 			  bright with		terror	and said
no, honey, 	nothing		like that		you’re not 		while in the room
	across the hall	I heard		laughter	a woman exclaim	             congratulations


                                                                  and suddenly I was no one’s mother

For T, Who Begs Me to Consider the Tragedy
	after Anne Sexton

I wonder what it must feel like, to be that sure
of yourself. To bestow gravitas on what you deem
grave. You see, I am tired of performing grief
so that you may call it grief, tired of prostrating
to the figures of tragic men. Hamlet, with his canopy, 
the roof fretted with golden fire. Lear, haggard on the moor,
and Cordelia, like the good child should, cupping his face 
with her two good hands. It isn’t lost on me: 
you’d deem the tragedy of my wrist circumstantial 
if I decided to split it. Each month is a new tragedy: 
my wound opens again to spit another child 
onto cotton, and no, I am not a mother. And the dramatic
action, you say,  isn’t enough to warrant the articulation: I am not
a mother. The argument of this poem is that grief 
is a series of painful articulations. I am not a mother. The sun 
the day after I climbed out of bed and brushed out my matted
curls was a flat, watery disk and I was not a mother. The room 
where the man touched me was a tomb: gray, cement walls and I
was not a mother. I crept on my knees in the dark 
to the dashed string of lights on the floor, still bleeding 
from the cut place. And you say it isn’t tragic enough, 
the loss of my child. The act of it. 
But I ask you this: did you ever hold
your wife as she bled from that darkest part
of herself? Did you wonder at the syntax
of your shared grief, then? Did you criticize the diction
of a mouth ruined by loss?  You must’ve. 
After all, you know so much about my life. 

Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer (they/she) is the author of the poetry collection Bad Animal (Riot in Your Throat, 2023) and the chapbook Small Geometries (Ethel, 2023.) The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, their work has been published in The Missouri Review, The Adroit Journal, and others. They have been nominated for Best of the Net and Best New Poets and have received support from The Seventh Wave and Tin House. They are a graduate of Syracuse University’s MFA program in poetry and will start a PhD in Comparative Literature at NYU in Fall 2024.

Image: “Angel of Grief” from Monument for Jennie Roosevelt Pool, at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park, Colma, CA, from Seattleretro under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license via Wikimedia Commons.