In love, as in war, I learned
_ to skin sweet from meat—you
next to me at some farm upstate, where we go
_ to pretend we are something together that borders
on the country of sweetness—I learned to eat
_ with all my teeth, a horse in trousers
and a turtleneck blouse. Believe me, I could only eat
_ once I saw you had eaten. In all ways
I wanted to feed you first: sugar, lump and rocky
_ in my mouth, sugar I used to steal
from my grandmother, when my grandmother lived
_ a little time in this world. I asked this of you:
a little sugar, a little heat: it was autumn
_ and I myself had learned a little while
to live in this world. I was a child until I wasn’t.
_ I was naïve well into my age, the years
grown up around me like a forest, spitting out
_ its mechanical, colorful dead. For every second I spend
alive, I can count a leaf. For every minute you love me,
_ I count these dead things.
Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer
Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer is the author of the novella Views from a Plague Room (Querencia Press, 2026), Bad Animal (Riot in Your Throat, 2023) and the chapbook Small Geometries (Ethel, 2023). The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, her work has been published in The Missouri Review, The Adroit Journal, and The Masters Review, among others. She is a graduate of Syracuse University’s MFA program in poetry and is a doctoral student at New York University.
