11th Annual Juried Reading Finalist

Catherine Pierce of Columbia, Missouri

Catherine Pierce is the author of Animals of Habit (Kent State University Press, 2004), a winner of the Wick Chapbook Competition. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Slate, Gulf Coast, Barrow Street, Smartish Pace, Bellingham Review, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere. She is currently a PhD candidate/Creative Writing fellow at the University of Missouri, and holds the MFA from the Ohio State University.

Fat Tuesday

Down on Canal amid masks and dark
the cat-girl's heart opens into the street.

No one notices; people revolve through
the liquor mart like soldiers. In an alley,

one man kneels before another. They love
each other. One has given the other

rare purple beads. A girl joins them
and they welcome her like a daughter.

Women have had their breasts painted
like delicate moths. In the dark they look

clothed. In the dark they look hungry.
At the other end of the Quarter, a woman

dressed in red sings in a black-red bar.
She collects change in a jar and performs

Elvis tunes in Portuguese. She is a house
favorite. A man sits beneath the table.

He imagines he is home, in the snow,
somewhere he has always hated. He has

no lover, but will find one. He will slouch
with purpose toward Canal. The cat-girl

will watch him with glassed eyes. She is housed
now in sleep. The city has given her up.

© 2005 The Poetry Center of Chicago
All Rights Revert Back to the Author Upon Publication.
No Portion of this poem may be reproduced without the expressed permission of the author.