Martha Collins
Click on the "Archive" button above to return to the Features archives
Martha Collins' book-length poem Blue Front, which focuses on a lynching her father witnessed as a child, is forthcoming in June 2006 from Graywolf. A chapbook of her poems, Gone So Far, was published by Barnwood Press in 2005. Her earlier collections are Some Things Words Can Do (Sheep Meadow, 1998); A History of Small Life on a Windy Planet (Georgia, 1993); The Arrangement of Space (Peregrine Smith, 1991); and The Catastrophe of Rainbows (Cleveland State, reissued 1998).
Collins has also co-translated and published two volumes of Vietnamese poetry: Green Rice by Lam Thi My Da, co-translated with Thuy Dinh (Curbstone, 2005), and The Women Carry River Water, co-translated with author Nguyen Quang Thieu (UMass, 1997), which won an ALTA award. Other awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation, as well as a Lannan residency award and three Pushcart Prizes.
Collins founded the Creative Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and since 1997 has taught at Oberlin College, where she is Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Border
Hasta luego and over you go and it's not
serapes, the big sombreros, not even coyotes,
rivers and hills, though that's more like it, towers
with guards, Stop! or we shoot and they do but you don’t
need a border for that, a fence will do, a black
boy stuck to its wire like a leaf, a happy gun
in the thick pink hand that wags from the sleeve, even
a street, the other side, a door, a skin, give
me a hand, and she gives him a hand, she gives him both
her hands, the bones of her back are cracking, the string
has snapped, she’s falling, she’s pleated paper, paper
is spreading and there you are again, over
the edge, you open your hands and what have you got
but confetti and what can you do with confetti, our
side won, a celebration, shaken hands, it matters
now, whatever it is, but how close
you are, your street, the fence behind your house
is the zero border where minus begins, roots
turn branches, cellar is house, you close your busy
mouth to speak, an anti-lamp darkens
the day, and you love that street, its crazy traffic,
you climb that fence, you wave across, there’s a rock
in your hand but it’s not your fault, you like to travel,
the colorful people, but what if you fell, your house,
your children, the work that gets you up in the morning,
the language gone, the grammar, the rules, the family
talent, those searching eyes, but think of the absence
of eye, a higher tower, a little more wire
Border? You crossed the border hours ago.
from Some Things Words Can Do (Sheep Meadow)
["There were trees on those streets that were named"]
There were trees on those streets that were named
for trees: Sycamore, Cedar, Poplar, Pine,
Elm, where the woman’s body was found,
where the man’s body was taken and burned
There must have been trees, there were trees
on Seventh Street, in front of the house that stands
in the picture behind the carriage that holds
the boy’s mother, the boy’s cousin, the boy
And of course there were trees on Washington
Avenue, wide boulevard lined with exotic
ginkgoes, stately magnolias, there were trees
on that street that are still on that street,
trees that shaded the fenced-in yards of the large
Victorian houses, the mansion built by the man
who sold flour to Grant for the Union troops,
trees that were known to the crowd that saw
the victim hanged, though not on a tree, this
was not the country, they used a steel arch
with electric lights, and later a lamppost, this
was a modern event, the trees were not involved.
from Blue Front (Graywolf, forthcoming) first published in
the Kenyon Review
