Martha Collins
Winter 2023 | Poetry
Mouse
had been stealing my little yellow
tomatoes and nibbling my avocadoes
but I wasn’t thinking of mouse
when I turned the water on in the sink
and a little gray head popped out
of the drain whiskers twitching—
whiskers that scan as our eyes scan
ears that hear sounds we can’t
And I might have thought cute but mouse
had been stealing my yellow
tomatoes and pooping on my counter
and there was a coffee cup
in the sink and when mouse
scrambled out of the drain—
facial expressions that indicate fear
voices that sing what we can’t hear
I put the coffee cup over
mouse and moved the coffee
cup around and finally slid the coffee
cup over the drain and turned
on the water and reached under the sink
and turned the garbage grinder on—
smarter than cats I loved my cats
my granddaughter loves her rat
I killed the mouse they killed the chickens
I ate they killed the cattle pigs the little
lamb I ate I poisoned mice I trapped
mice I slapped mosquitoes I killed . . .
But mouse and I, whiskers to eye,
creature to creature, had met.
Martha Collins has published eleven books of poetry, most recently Casualty Reports (Pittsburgh, 2022) and Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019); the latter won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. She has also co-translated five volumes of Vietnamese poetry, most recently Dreaming the Mountain by Tuệ Sỹ, with Nguyen Ba Chung (Milkweed, 2023). Collins founded the U.Mass. Boston creative writing program and for ten years served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin. Her website is marthacollinspoet.com