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

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