Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer
Dore
after Sanam Sheriff, with a line from Marina Tsvetaeva

Your name is a worm wriggling stupid through
my ear canal. I whisper it to myself, to each moon,

waxing outside my window, rustling its skirt of stars like a daughter
I might never have. Father. For years, I have thought of you

dying. Four years ago, I almost died, but didn’t,
and I didn’t tell you about it. After the man

who was not a man but an asp encircling
my breast with entitlement did his work

on me, I thought very hard about dying. Many men. I essay this
with the entitlement of the breast in question. Father. I drank

like you after the incidents for pain
of a different kind. Father. You wanted to name me

Cassandra, and the irony is not lost. Father
I drank so hard I can’t stomach port anymore; no sea,

no harbor that will lead me to you, Father, as you envision me:
still chaste, untouched by the world.

Once, a boy touched my chest and asked me
if I was like him. I stopped you from caning his

head in; what you would do if I told you who
is not lost on me either. To keep the crypt of those

you’d bury is a heavy inheritance, Father. I am trying to be
a good ghost. I say this with the knowledge of the clock

ticking its awful music inside you, and the silence
of your future. How do I hold this bird in my hand?

*

Calvary/Cavalry
after Marc Chagall

I, too, contain a multitude
of angles, the man’s love
dulling with each thud of nail
on wood. My name means pure
in every language but mine.
A cicatrix, it taught me
to prostrate myself before men
robed in the colors of God before
my mother told me God wasn’t real
and the sky sickened the green
of my love’s face when I came
with all my wrath ringing
my collar gold, rinsing my face
with my father’s blood. When I asked
the damnable questions, I sat ready
to string him up by his hair. I sat
ready with horses.

*

Derivation
“Even trauma sounds like “Traum,” the German word for dream.” Aria Aber

Sometimes, I dream I never left that room, my underwear pushed
to the side like an afterthought: a bit of mess on the plate. A man named

for God’s judgement assaults me and so, a pregnancy test. A man couldn’t
help himself, and so I called my mother, who called me everything but my name.

My mother, who named me for tradition,
for grandmothers named

after pearls, lilies, after foliage. Somewhere, the dead women
of my family rise from the grave to mother me, to call my name

into the blackening night. These women, who are so like
and unlike me it makes me cry, who share this ornamentation,

this wound that constellates out from my center,
its bad inheritance, this name

my name, which means pure. Kathryn a bird flying
into the autumn air. I watch it go, and something inside me loosens, is named.