September 27, 2022

potluck

The long table held the disparity of the guests: baked salmon under foil,
a polka-dotted bowl of sliced apples, spinach salad half-mooned with the season’s
last tomatoes. We went around the circle introducing ourselves. The rain had held off. 
Someone hauled firewood down the hill in a weathered wheelbarrow. 
The couple beside me had been married only a year. Nearby, two toddlers 
were collaborating on a construction project with the pea gravel underfoot,
kneeling in front of a pair of tiny yellow bulldozers. The world was dampened
by sorrow, and some of it had followed us here. But isn’t that always the story?
We had gathered anyway, as we must, making a loose line behind a stack of paper plates,
our bodies bearing an old, stubborn hunger that somehow never failed to surprise us.