by Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer

Today, Twitter is full of news about mothers. One is
dead, another in remission from an aggressive cancer, and

in Mariupol, a maternity hospital is bombed. A woman on
a stretcher, her belly jutting skyward, looks sideways at

the camera. It pins her in this moment to the landscape
like a butterfly to corkboard, wings fluttering, in this moment still

alive. My mother is worried about nuclear war again, my mother who grew
up cowering beneath a desk, grew up with better dead than red.

Her mother won’t talk to her about the war. Asked her instead:
Can we pick this up later? Jeopardy is coming on. My mother

tells me that I should buy food just in case, cases of water. Enough
to last you a few weeks. We don’t know when things will get uglier, but

they can always get uglier. She tells me I’m so glad you aren’t
in Russia. And aren’t you glad you’re an American?

Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer’s work has previously been published or is forthcoming in The Missouri Review, The Adroit Journal, Crazyhorse, Poet Lore, Beloit Poetry Journal, and other magazines. The recipient of a 2022 Pushcart Prize, they have won awards from the Ledbury Poetry Festival and Bryn Mawr College, as well as received support from The Seventh Wave and Tin House. Their chapbook, Small Geometries, is forthcoming with Ethel Zine & Micro Press in April/May 2023. They attend Syracuse University’s MFA program.