Cigarillo by Cate Marvin from "World's Tallest Disaster"

The book from which this poem came is amazing.  Every single poem is awesome, just perfect.  I highly recommend that you buy it and devour each and every word. 

Poetry is life distilled.  It's medicine for the soul and spirit-candy.  We must buy and read poetry and support poets because this genre is suffering.  Every time I go into Books-A-Million, (our only book store now that Waldenbooks has folded) the poetry section has shrunk another five shelves.  It used to be 15 shelves, then 10 and now it's 5 measley shelves with mostly ancient poetry books from dead old men.  As often as I can, I call and order books from their store, but I'm just one lonely poetry-lover.  Wishing you sushine, poetry and inspiration. Blessings!  ~Marion

Here's the book from which the poem below came:

 

CIGARILLO

By Cate Marvin

The visit of a body.  Ants gathered sugar

   along the kitchen counter.  Their bounty was significant.

      But a moon ought to be red, too ripe for the sky.

         Instead, it lay a calm hand on the body.

By the door's unsealed edge, a chill found entrance.

   But a moon ought to be full.  Instead, it was half.

      It hung like a low-watt bulb, gave just enough light to read

         lips by.  Enough that it and the lit tip of the cigarillo

were all right to see the body by.  In the half light,

   the belly was clean bone almost.  The skin so young,

       I thought soprano.  Rare to have a visitor call, strange

         to be overcome.  But a moon ought to open for occasion.

Should I have called up the whole sky, interrogated

   constellations?  No, it wasn't summer enough for flowers,

      even in the sky.  But the moon was up so why

         wouldn't it attend to the evening?  So my selfishness

would have stars fly like tears from a tossing head---

   but, no, the stomach was like pearl, the bed inhabited.

      The moon should have been as wide as the eyes were blue.

         Even if I couldn't see either through the smoke

from the cigarillo, which waved gray arms like ghosts

   in the room.  I've had the sky in my grasp before, squinted

      hard to make a star shoot---but I was stunned before bareness,

         skin breathing its paleness.  If the weather were in concert,

the perfection might have been bearable.  The cigarillo's lit

   tip kissed darkness.  It was a shrill moment, the touch

      of finger to tendon.  In the yard, a leaf opened slowly.

         Sweet.  The ants took to their  path on the counter.

From:  "World's Tallest Disaster" by Cate Marvin

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I don't create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me. ~Edith Södergran

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Like butterflies in Spring
Poetry awakens the Spirit,
stirs the imagination and explores
the possibilities with each stroke of its rhythmic wings.  ~Jamie Lynn Morris

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Come voyeur my poems
Feel free, I feel free.  ~Carrie Latet

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