January 2009
This Is Not An Elegy by Catherine Pierce
At sixteen, I was illegal and brilliant, my fingernails chewed to half-moons. I took off my clothes in a late March field. I had secret car wrecks, secret hysteria. I opened my mouth to swallow stars. In backseats I learned the alchemy of guilt, lust, and distance. I was unformed and total. I swore like a sailor. But slowly the cops stopped coming around. The heat lifted its palms. The...
“Then laugh, leaning back in my arms, for life is not a paragraph, and death I...”
– E. E. Cummings