Catherine Pierce

I plucked this small book of poetry off the shelf because I liked the title and the cover art. I liked these beautiful, strange poems about girls, identity, desire and the 70's.

THE CHILD HAS READ EVERYTHING

And everything is haunted: the storybook where girls
in dirndls are devoured. Her mother's silver-spined
paperbacks that heat her in dark places. The newspaper
with it's front page bloodied by the car crash. She can't

stop her eyes. She tries to forget what she's read, but
like that other story, once she's bitten in, she can't untaste.
Her mind won't listen, veers off into the forest marked

Forbidden, holds a knife to her throat when she begs it
to stop. For safety, she drinks her own guilt. It inoculates her.
Everyone thinks she is the good daughter,
her world a gold-leaf illustration. No one knows

the words seed themselves in her brain. That they grow
and grow,their roots tangled, their limbs goblin-fingered.
No one hears how they whisper, Think me. The words

blacken and climb until she can't see past their spiny tops.
Even as the world goes on real around her, she is shadowed.
Sometimes light flickers above the clawed trees, and in it
she can make out people moving. They laugh like the dragon

isn't always behind them. Like the limbs aren't full
of hanged children, swinging. Like they have never
watched, horrified, their minds race over the landscape

like escaped hounds. She aches toward the people. But then
the pages open again and she gorges herself to sickness.
She doesn't want to find the path. She's the wicked daughter,
the one who stays lost, and she'll learn that story by heart.

She'll dwell in her own darkness, grow lizard-lidded,
cat-limbed. She'll drink her evil down. She'll twist the trees
into every shape but the one that reads The End.… (mere)