Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem, every Thursday.
PRACTICE THIS MISTAKE

Make no mistake. If, however, you do, the best way to correct your mistake is to practice. That’s what they say. You don’t just make a simple correction; you make the same mistake, over and over.

But what do they mean? How far should you go? Should you practice your mistake like the scales? Should you practice it like a profession?

Let’s say the mistake is here. This contains the mistake. Or mistakes: there may be three or four, like misspellings in those ads that promised free gifts or lessons, if you found the misspelled words.

Here, there may be more mistakes. This whole thing maybe be a mistake. You yourself may be the mistake.

If you are, you can practice. In our studio. On your way to work. In the privacy of your home.
Martha Collins’s 11th volume of poetry is Casualty Reports (Pittsburgh, 2022); her 10th, Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019), won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. Her fifth collection of co-translated Vietnamese poetry, Dreaming the Mountain: Poems by Tue Sy, is due from Milkweed in May. Collins founded the UMass Boston creative writing program and later served as Pauline Delaney Professor of creative writing at Oberlin College. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and her website is marthacollinspoet.com

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx