#Catherine Pierce

[havingapoemwithyou]

probably it will be summer again by Catherine Pierce

[annarexcouture]

[lunchboxpoems]

CATHERINE PIERCE

[agirlnamedbone]

pub. in Blackbird Review, 2017

[scraebble]

Probably It Will Be Summer Again by Catherine Pierce

[thegodwhocums]

Earth, Sometimes I Try to Play It Casual,

like Hey mercury, hey malachite, I'm busy today, can't stop to marvel, but always my blood is saying O god you starsprung miracle. It's self-preservation,

letting myself believe laundry matters, letting myself believe there's anything other than egrets and oceans and vast moss carpets and

the finite heart of every single person I love. Earth, you terrify me—you are fierce green and honeysuckle, you are herds of wild ponies,

and you are leaving, always. Is it any wonder some days I look at my laptop instead of out the window? Every time I glance up

there you are, quaking me with your fern fronds and silver frost. O you of the rhyolite mountains. You of the dew-hung web. You are lemon quartz

and quicksand. Muskrats and starfish. How could I be any way but staggered? O blue spruce, O white fir, O green forever, you know

my nonchalance is a sham. It's so hard to admit our real desires. Earth, what I want is to sit gentle under your twilight purple, watch your bats

hunt and dive. What I want is to know about endings and still love each bat, each shade of the boundless, darkening sky.

Catherine Pierce, 2022

[violettesiren]

Dear spring, commit. Burst your bee-and-bloom, your blaze of blue, get heady, get frocked, get spun. Enough with your tentative little breaths, your one-day-daffodils/ one-day-dewfrost. Honeysuckle us right to our knees. Wake us with your all-night mockingbirds, your rowdy tree frogs. Gust and dust us. Pollen-bomb the Hondas and front halls, but please, no more of this considering. This delicate- tendrilling. Your pale green worries me. Your barely-tuliped branches, your slim shoots any sideways look could doom. The truth is I don't want to think about fragility anymore. I can't handle a blown-glass season, every grass blade and dogwood so wreckable. I'm trying hard to teach the infallibility of nightlights, to ignore the revving of my own fallible heart. Spring, you're not helping. Go all in. Throw your white blossoms into my gutters. Flood my garage, mud my new shoes, leave me afternoon-streaked and sweating. Vine yourself around me. Hold me to you. Tighter.

Entreaty by Catherine Pierce

[abellinthecupboard]

Poem Begun While Watching My Son’s Gymnastics Class

Coltish is how we describe the children when they ricochet, all knees and chaos, through our homes, mud everywhere, walls scraped, and we smile ruefully, or shoo them outside, or snap What are you thinking? and hope the neighbors don’t hear, but until right now I have never considered the animal itself, wild-limbed and pent in tasteful two-story, never considered how a coffee table or ceiling fan or towering bookcase has no place in the windswept prairie, never considered how strange the kitchen’s cool tile must feel under hooves built for grasslands golden and lawless.

— Catherine Pierce, featured in Diode Poetry Volume 16 #1 (source)

[ensorcellment-biscuit]

[rustbeltjessie]

Catherine Pierce, from The Girls of Peculiar (Saturnalia Books, 2012)

Desire: Three Girls

I. MISSISSIPPI, 1958 In the violet evening the radio crackles like a candy wrapper. You hate Eisenhower for interrupting The Cisco Kid. Mama hides everything in her angry bouffant. You think she is beautiful—mouth a coral slash, lashes like spider legs. You tell her she is Miss America and she turns away. Your father left for town in '54 and hasn't brought the ham home yet. Most nights you sup on the glances of bicycling boys. The air is wet and bright. You might call it languid. You in high summer are languid, your limbs too stick-like still to cozen longing, though you know that ache like you know the translucent lizards on the stuck screen door. You have a moss-drenched oak and a tire swing. When you spin high, your bare legs flash against leaves. No one scolds you. Every house on the street has eyes. In a glass jar you corral an army of fireflies. When you release them, they blind the houses. You know because when you leave no one's watching.

II. PENNSYLVANIA, 1961 All summer you've practiced your Jayne Mansfield stretch beside Becca's leaf-clogged pool. Pottstown in August is an egg sizzling on the black skillet

of Pennsylvania. You dream of New England, where you've never been, where Mr. Smithson will take you and buy you town homes and brooches, where streets

are strung with white lights and summer is women in moss-colored shifts and golden, minted drinks. Your Coke is an injustice, and Mr. Smithson understands. His daughter

can't handle bourbon, but you're a siren. Back outside, you dive into the shallow end and swan up just in time. No one knows how close you came. No one ever will.

III. MARYLAND, 1964 The rental cottage gives you the creeps, its corners dark and peopled with blankeyed dolls. But outside the sun is an open mouth, calling. You hold your breath and sink into the sea, hoping the red-suited guard will save you. When you pop up, a bright cork, he's dozing. All afternoon you loll in the sand; its billion tiny mouths leave bites on your palms and thighs. On the boardwalk, you drip vinegar on fries and gauge your lips' pinkness by the sting. Pickup trucks drive by, all whoop and holler. The catcalls are aloe on your skin. One truck pulls over. Your name and age ripple out in a ribbon of lies. Suddenly your hair is a triumph of salt and shine. You are ablaze, the cottage too airless ever to hold you. In the rusted truck bed, a keg, a blanket. You glance up. The sun's open mouth says: Go.

[havingapoemwithyou]

entreaty by Catherine Pierce

[lunarwildrose]

The Pierces - It Will Not Be Forgotten

Darling, what we had It cannot be taken  It cannot be stolen And it won't be forgotten No, it won't be forgotten♡ 

(Deeply resonates with me and my SO, Karasu♡)

[cinivia]

Wakes up*

unwanted person in my energy alert !

[agirlnamedbone]

pub. in Blackbird Review

[generouswindow]

Probably It Will Be Summer Again

by CATHERINE PIERCE

one of these days, and if it is I'll swim, bobbing up and down over probably, it will be summer and my god I'll say hello to people who don't live in my house, it will be summer and my eyes reluctant after a full day of refracted ocean light and dolphin-squint, or maybe library and carousel and everyone's bright skirts, bright sunglasses, bright burns and canvas bags, I'll rejoin the perpetual chorus of We should, perpetual chorus of Let's, my god my best friend's baby who's talking now, my god the bay is still there and I promise I will be a fool for humans and all wild proclivities, I will gently turn horseshoe crabs right-side-up, I will not tell myself Maybe a meteor or Maybe a phone call or Maybe a sudden shift in atmosphere, I will remind myself of mouths moving in ways that are summer and of my skin casual next to someone else's skin and the soft salt smell and haunted house shrieks, and Probably I will say, Probably I will make myself say, and I will say it and I will say it until it is who and where, it is who and where we are.

[revmeg]

Bees ricochet in and out of the clustered petals, and my sons panic and dash and I tell them about good insects, pollination, but the truth is I want their fear-box full of bees. This morning the radio said tender age shelters. This morning the glaciers are retreating.

from “High Dangerous” by Catherine Pierce, in The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood edited by Emily Pérez and Nancy Reddy, p. 3