Trash Witch
Poetry by Martha McCollough
$18.00
Praise for Trash Witch
Reading Martha McCollough’s poems is akin to peering into a set of Joseph Cornell boxes: one finds lush dreamscapes full of surprising enchantments, prismatic symbols, and wry meditations. Indeed, the Trash Witch is the savvy friend you longed for in middle school and again in middle age, someone to protect you from the neighborhood bully and keep you laughing while you hide under the porch, plotting your next “picnic on the moon.” Her punk wit and Rilkean acuity return us to the private pleasures of childhood, solitude, and mythos in the everyday: Persephone is the “pale queen” of a trailer park; under floorboards, “even the rat’s composing its memoirs”; a “guardian angel” appears as the “looming sad sargent / of rules I meant to evade”; and love affairs with “difficult / people I loved for being difficult, / [are] puzzles with a missing final piece.” Luminous intelligence spills from these poems, a “hum of starlight” to accompany us in our daily rounds, “keeping the atoms organized / patted into the shape / of a body,” if occasionally feeling “homesick / for who knows what.” McCollough answers that “what,” nourishing an essential hunger.
– Heather Treseler, author of Auguries & Divinations
Sharp dressed man
callcrow king
mobbed under
wings blueblacker
than top hats
all those little
gentlemen
on the strut
in the straw
white eyes gleam
feathering
the nesty beard
come running bring
him a ring a stickpin
stab it in clean
as you can
glittering links
held together
with black ties
with trinkets
and formality
crow crazy
At Evening
It’s not that I don’t love the world, say when it’s gilded in
late light like a movie about Edwardians having a picnic,
green hills that swoon into harmless dark, as war comes
toward the white dresses—or when shade creeps over the
lawn and a cardinal begins his evening chant, a warning
to all other cardinals, repeated from his high lair till at
some exact degree of dusk he sleeps in the sway.
About the Author
Martha McCollough is the author of Wolf Hat Iron Shoes (Lily Poetry
Review Books 2022) and the chapbook Grandmother Mountain (Blue
Lyra 2019). Her poems have appeared in Bennington Review, Pleiades,
The Boiler, Bear Review, and Tampa Review, among others. Originally
from Detroit, she lives in Amherst, MA.
