Martha Collins

[white paper #46]

Obama Waffles Mix
sold at Values Voter
Summit September

2008 in a yellow
box with an Aunt
Jemima version

of the candidate
on the front wide
eyes thick lips and on

the top flap the candidate
in Muslim dress and on
the back the candidate

in Mexican sombrero
with a recipe for Open
Border waffles to serve

illegal aliens all
the same African
American terrorist

immigrant not
white like the stuff
in the box

which cannot be
eaten and enjoyed
until mixed and browned

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 is Dreaming the Mountain by Tuệ Sỹ, with Nguyen Ba Chung (Milkweed, 2023).  Collins founded the U.Mass. Boston creative writing program and taught at Oberlin College for ten years. 

 

Plume: Issue #4 October 2011