With bracing honestly, this week’s poem takes up that fraught moment when a child asks a question with an answer that delves into the near-endless list of all that’s wrong with the world we’ve created.

Cate Marvin lives in Scarborough and teaches poetry writing in the Stonecoast master of fine arts program at the University of Southern Maine, and is a professor of English at the College of Staten Island. In 2009, she co-founded the nonprofit organization VIDA: Women in Literary Arts with poet Erin Belieu. Her third book of poems, “Oracle,” was released from W.W. Norton & Co. in 2015.

It’s a Limousine

By Cate Marvin

It is nothing like a shark but the monochrome blanched off-white

of its long body is dumb like a shark’s nose and dead eyes and

it is turning a corner.

                                    There’s always a child in awe who asks

“what is that.” And we must supply the information, however

embarrassing our world may be in the explanation.

                                                                                    For example

this dumb automobile that will make me one day explain Prom,

which made me, personally, throw up in a parking lot. Or wealth.

That one is difficult.

                                    Because the sparkling wide-eyed young ones

all want all the money and candy and most especially baby kittens

the size of gumdrops that will never grow up.

                                                                        For them our world

is a cotton candy haze except when you accidentally mention

a dead cat who was named “Peanut.” Then the storm appears

on the brow, looms like charred

                                                            coffee at the depths of a cup.

And why shouldn’t we give that man bent on the corner money?

(Because we don’t have much money, honey.) What’s that?

A man who drives a very nice car

                                                            and is just about hit you. You must

remind these little dumb-dumbs they are very small, no one can

see them, anyone is liable to run them over, no one cares about

what grade

                        they’re in, they must stop touching everything,

they can’t have cake, popcorn, popsicles, cupcakes for breakfast,

lunch or dinner. It’s a limousine, and it represents every stupidity

known to human

                        kind. And you, my child, are never allowed to ride

in one. May they one day become obsolete, may spaceships replace

them, may you one day cease to force me to answer all of your

questions about this

                        awful world again. Though by then I may be dead.

And for now I’ll take grabbing your hand in mine while crossing

this fearsome parking lot as my one true reason to live.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is a poet who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2019 Cate Marvin. It appeared originally in The Baffler and appears here by permission of the author. Submissions to the Deep Water column are open through the end of October. For more information, go to mainewriters.org/programs/deep-water.

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