The Geek Girls — Blackbird Archive

← v10n1, Spring 2011

Were we never robins? No, we never were.

No one recognized spring in us, though great elms

grew inside our rib cages. They pushed their spiny

tips outward, so that we felt small stabbings daily,

but they never broke through. So we were never spring,

never foliage. We were the small and oddball beasts:

anoles, silverfish, shrimp. We moved fast and sideways,

upways, allways but straight. We heard of nights lit

with lightning bugs and cigarettes. With rumflame

and tonguefire. We needed none of it. The nights were

black puzzleboxes and we solved them. It was easy—

in the darkness, our minds sparked like flint.

childhood identity

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