The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Bad Animal by Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer

This selection, chosen by Managing Editor Krista Cox, is from Bad Animal by Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer (Riot in your Throat Press 2023).

Self-Portrait as Moirologist

It’s my job to mourn. To wear black
like my father wore black, to stalk and bawl
behind a hearse as it makes its slow crawl
towards the cemetery. And when I watched
the crows gather, they watched me too.
We stood there, observing each other as around us,
a clique of corpses was laid to rest. And when one bird
fell from the line in a burst of electricity and feathers, I ran
to catch it. Paid the rest of the murder no mind
as they surrounded their dead friend and cawed,
pecked my hands when I got too close. Everyone
mourns differently. Some are the carrion birds and some
are carrion, the difference barely palpable. I cannot shake
the feeling I will die soon. In the incredible inky
darkness of night, I am holding a man to my chest, hoping
he doesn’t wake to a body. I am holding a bird in my hands
and watching it die.

Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer 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, her poetry has been published in The Missouri Review, The Adroit Journal, and others. Her fiction has been published/is forthcoming in Giving Room Magazine and The Masters Review. She is a graduate of Syracuse University’s MFA program in Poetry and is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at New York University.

Krista Cox is Managing Editor of The Wardrobe, Doubleback Review, and Sundress Publications. She is growing her hair out again and reclaiming her childhood dreams.