Catherine Pierce

The Elements

(with lines from The Girl’s Own Book, by Lydia Maria Child, 1834)

In this game, the girls sit in a circle.
One tosses a handkerchief at another

and calls Air! or Earth! or Water!
and the other must answer quickly

with a proper animal—goshawk,
beetle, whale. If the person fails to speak

quick enough, a forfeit must be paid.
It’s a lively time—the white cloth’s

velocity, the gasping panic
of forgetting every swimming thing.

The girls love the gasping, how it
aches their lungs, makes their hearts

race like the black terrier when he
bullets to the fields beyond the yard.

Their laughter rends the close air.
The girls call Oriole! Tiger! They’ll pay

no forfeit. No one comes to hush
them, not yet. Their older sisters

are stitching in the parlor.
Their older sisters are marrying.

Soon the veal cutlets. Soon
the trousseau. Already the girls know

how to stitch straight, how to coax
the dust from the deepest corner.

Asleep by the hearth, the terrier
stretches. If any one player calls out

“Fire!” everyone must keep silence,
because no creature lives in that element.

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Catherine Pierce is the author of three books of poems, most recently The Tornado Is the World (Saturnalia 2016); her new book, Danger Days, is forthcoming in October 2020. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, the New York Times, American Poetry Review, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series and elsewhere, and has won a Pushcart Prize. A 2019 NEA Fellow, she co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.