Martha Collins

PRACTICING EIGHTS

After I almost died, it was hard
to make 5s, and I couldn’t make 8s.
 
In the force 8 wind, the leaves
became little sails, uprooting their tree.
 
And so I practiced: 5 5 5, then shaky
8 8 8, all the way down the page.
 
Of course they traded eights:
they were playing blues.
 
Until the 10th century, the Perso-
Arabic 8 resembled our 5.
 
Each of the eight octopus arms is a brain
that can “taste-touch” and sense light.
 
Then that figure got looped around:
you can start with a 5 and make an 8!
 
Buddha gave us the eight-fold path,
Jesus eight beatitudes. Blessed is the 8.

Author: Martha Collins

Martha Collins’s eleventh volume of poetry is Casualty Reports (Pittsburgh, 2022); her tenth, Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019), won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. Her fifth volume of co-translated Vietnamese poetry, Dreaming the Mountain by Tuệ Sỹ, with Nguyen Ba Chung (Milkweed, 2023), was a PEN translation award finalist. Collins founded the U.Mass. Boston creative writing program and taught at Oberlin College for ten years.

Plume: Plume Issue # 152 April 2024