Blackbird Archive
← v10n1, Spring 2011
Poetry · Volume 10, Number 1

The Drama Girls

Catherine Pierce

our desire. We were our desire. We were bird

cries, sudden and more obscene than was necessary.

We were paste jewels glinting in pines. We were

never the lake, but we were the lakeside creatures,

soft bellied, begging. We rolled over to be patted,

and then we put teeth to skin. And then we rolled again.

These days ache. We send our voices out

into air, and air eats them. We are meant to be thrown

stones. Where is the mirrored sky for us to shatter?

childhoodidentitygender
Catherine Pierce

Catherine Pierce’s most recent book of poems is The Tornado Is the World (Saturnalia, 2016). She is also the author of The Girls of Peculiar (Saturnalia, 2012), winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Prize, and Famous Last Words (Saturnalia, 2008), winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry (2015, 2011), Boston Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University. Photo by Megan Bean