‘The Doomsday Clock’ Sounds Like the Title of a B-Movie

← v21n2, Fall 2022

Some of us play villains: you can tell

by our eyebrows and schemes. Some of us

play scientists: you can tell by our elaborate

charts. Our sons and daughters play

neighborhood kids who ride bikes and yell

Hey mister! There are no other roles.

Near the end, the ticks pick up speed,

metronoming catastrophe. Headlines—

FIRE! FLOOD! CITY GONE!—

spin out of the black while violins swell,

staccato and frantic. We follow

the script. Plot and cajole. Sometimes

we imagine an audience filling the dark

theatre. They boo and cheer in all

the right places as if, from our bright

burning screen, we can hear them.

ecology politics humor

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