October Reunion
Poetry by Todd Dillard and Ben Kline
Granny says to park the chairs beneath the fire
-flared maple: six for the living, three for the dead
and no uncle breathing or full of dirt is to set his sorry ass
where Gran-Gran or any other nana should like
to rest her bones, spread the skirts of her death.
One table on the pavilion: bologna, rolled tubes
of ham and cheese, cucumber spears and clown nose tomatoes,
mustard, pickles, Paps on the grill with pink patties and dogs.
Another table under the tree: white bread and soil spread,
bowls of aphids, snuffboxes stuffed with love
letter ash, charcuterie of cowpit and feldspar.
Name tags shaped like gravestones for, Granny says,
"the returning to learn which young'ns to haunt."
And when they come, the dead come with ravens,
a conspiracy of wingbeats and darkening day,
bottle caps in the preacher's punch, dusk urn-brassy,
the maple's fire a confusion of ember thickening,
a tongue turning breath into "Hush." Granny waves
at Uncle Rich, whose Ford Tempo rolled
into the Tennessee, his green brow crowned
with windshield shards and algae streamers,
at Aunt Roxy and her circlet of smoke, a Pall Mall
tucked between her teeth. Little Jerome calling
"No fair!" to the other children playing tag,
his legs inverted in '88 by a dare and a tractor
and a whole pile's worth of inattention. The uncles
play cornhole, horseshoe, cousins gossip about blanks
on the family tree. The aunts pray for babies in limbo.
The children play hide-and-seek, the pulsed ones
diving into bushes, tucking behind trees, learning
now there's nowhere you can run from the raven's cry;
the dead pooling into uncles' pockets, swirling in beer bottles.
Of course there's cake: one slice of carrot
for each of the pavilion crowd, the better to know
the sweet of earth. For the maple kin: dark
chocolate swirled with lamb's blood, raw garlic,
the better to remember the bite of air. Come midnight
it's the annual Red Rover farewell: on one side
the here, on the other side the gone. “Be not afraid.
We go before you always.” The turned earth,
the fractured dark as they run toward each other.
How no grip slips, no hold breaks,
and as the thresholds mingle, the ravens flock
away, and the youngest, cousin Mabel,
curled beneath the maple, sleeps.
Todd Dillard's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poet Lore, Waxwing, Fairy Tale Review, Asimov's Science Fiction, and Guernica. His debut collection of poetry Ways We Vanish (Okay Donkey Press) was a finalist for the 2021 Balcones Poetry Award. He lives outside of Philadelphia with his wife, two kids, and several as-yet unsourced bumps in the night.
Ben Kline (he/him) lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. Author of the chapbooks SAGITTARIUS A* and DEAD UNCLES, host of POETRY AFIELD and POETRY STACKED, Ben is a poet and storyteller whose work appears in POETRY, South Carolina Review, Southeast Review, Autofocus, fourteen poems and many other publications. Learn more at https://benklineonline.wordpress.com/.
