Catherine Pierce

ABECEDARIAN FOR THE DANGEROUS ANIMALS

All frantic and drunk with new warmth, the bees
buzz and blur the holly bush.
Come see.
Don’t be afraid. Or do, but
everything worth admiring can sting or sober.
Fix your gaze upward and
give bats their due,
holy with quickness and echolocation:
in summer’s bleakest hum, the air
judders and mosquitoes blink out,
knifed into small, quick mouths. Yes,
lurking in some unlucky bloodstreams
might be rabies or histoplasmosis, but almost
no one dies and you
owe the bats for your backyard serenity.
Praise the cassowary, its ultraviolet head, its
quills and purposeful claws. Only one
recorded human death, and if a boy
swung at you, wouldn’t you rage back? Or P.
terribilis, golden dart frog maligned by Latin,
underlauded and unsung, enough poison to
vex two elephants into death but ardent
with eggs and froglets, their bright protection
xyphoid. And of course,
yes, humans. Remarkable how our
zeal for safety manifests: poison, rifle, vanishment.

CATHERINE PIERCE is the author of several books, including The Tornado Is the World and, most recently, Danger Days (Saturnalia). Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review. A 2019 NEA Fellow, she lives in Starkville, Mississippi, where she codirects the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.