Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
Firefly
Its six legs coated with disease, it’s vulgar
like the aphid, the earwig. Its eyes are nightmare
globes. It does not love you or thank you
for the glass jar with air holes. Still, you want it
in your hands. Not for its yellow light like the soft
glow in the wooded cabin. Not for the vibrating
wings against your palms like champagne
bubbles bursting. Not even for the perfect
metaphors that ride on its sunflower-seed back—
the catching of a gone childhood, the memory
of keeping something alive. You pursue it
because it’s a slow beast, easily captured. Because
it hovers and floats. Because you can win at this,
and because it will fly off when you unfold
your hands, single-minded, unmoved by its loss.
Catherine Pierce is poet laureate of Mississippi and the author of four books of poems, most recently Danger Days (Saturnalia, 2020). Her other books include Famous Last Words (Saturnalia, 2008) and The Girls of Peculiar (Saturnalia, 2012). Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The American Poetry Review, AGNI, The Nation, and elsewhere. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and twotime Pushcart Prize winner, she codirects the creative writing program at Mississippi State University. (updated 4/2022)