Scenes from a Meal

Annalee Roustio

From our prior lives, we were reaped 

to be exactly here. Like tubers once  

evenly spaced, a great hand pulled and tossed  

us into proximity. Uprooted, unblinking. 

* 

Ghosts garland the room, 

* 

last year’s vagary having stolen half a million lives,  

forgotten hundreds in refrigerated trucks. Silently, we recall 

snow pouring in chutes so thick you could hear in them  

the timbre of a mother's hush, her ragged whisper; how,  

feeling the rime reach for us, we shuttered ourselves.  

Kept open the kitchen cabinets, left the faucets to drip. 

* 

Where did the birds go then? Did anyone check? 

* 

And the deniers, yes. Them. Party-going,  

vacationing. In the warm slurry of a spurious reality, 

they stirred only to affix to their beach chairs more  

direct sunlight, podcasts loud enough to muffle disharmony. 

Through the days, they turned like dials. 

* 

It had stiffened us: our griefs,  

our anger. These awkward movements. 

* 

Someone plays music.  

* 

We parse the extent to which cut flowers remain alive. 

* 

Our breath begins to darn what had torn.  

Scotch tape curls from the walls;

where its corners lift we see at once both then and now.  

* 

Bread is broken, champagne popped. In the icebox, a cake  

sweats. We, too, seem to have thawed into togetherness,  

forearms brushing as plates are passed. Our gentle  

hums lilt through the open windows, a flying thing

in concert with the fantasia of birds 

* 

(inexplicably, they’d returned). 

* 

No longer separate still lifes, we’re more—choric,  

cinematic. Inside our chests, the movement of lungs.  

Lilies arranged on the coffee table pivot and listen. 

It’s good, this singing to each other again. 

Image © Europeana

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Annalee Roustio is a writer from the Midwest who lives and works in New York City. She has an MFA from Southern Illinois University. Her poems have been published in Bluestem, RHINO, The Shore, and elsewhere.