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

The Quiet Girls

Catherine Pierce

Were we never wolves? No, we never were.

We never let ourselves be lured into a lair.

We never licked honey off an eyetooth

just for the sweet. We never swallowed

our own blood with the honey. We were

neither animal nor stone. We were ephemeral,

motes in light, breath in winter. Drifting

was safe travel; we knew it then, and we were right.

The earth slowed its spinning and we stayed on.

Trenches yawned, and we skirted them. We survived

the meteor shower—no fragments fell on us.

Still we float like spores, always aloft and away.

childhoodidentitysolitude
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