Tonight's Poet Corner: An Unexpected Reunion

An Unexpected Reunion
by Belinda Roddie

It was a family emergency,
one that brought together everyone
from the sweaty armpit of Mobile,
Alabama to the vegan cocktail dungeon
of Berkeley, California. I saw my Aunt
Rita, who never liked to pass a day without
clotting her lungs with nicotine. My estranged
brother Alan, who had a new tattoo of an eagle
on his right shoulder because the tattoo of an
eagle on his left shoulder wasn't epic enough.
My sweet cousin Tiffany, who had just come out

in the loudest way possible on Youtube
and was now dating a bombshell model
wannabe with straight black hair
and beautiful green eyes. I hugged them all,
taking in every smell: The tobacco,
the scabbed over skin next to my brother's
clavicle, the drugstore perfume that Tiffany bought
and used as if to impress her girlfriend, even though
I wondered if the odor was ever really noticed.

At the hotel, everyone ate steak,
even the vegetarians, and everyone
drank wine, even the alcoholics - except,
surprisingly, Uncle Nestor, who stuck to tonic
water and couldn't stop bunching his napkin
around his mouth because he hated crying
in public. When my father finally returned
from the hospital, I knew his hands were cold
without touching them. Once the heat had gone
out of him, that was how I knew. So we all sat

in the hotel bar and drank toasts to my mother,
and Grandma Lucy said that maybe she had been
too harsh on her for marrying my dad after all,
and once the wine was gone, we ordered champagne
and told stories until it got late, and everyone
went to bed except my father and me. We had
a funeral to plan, and the rest of them had
to amble their way back home and be thankful
for the extra time that my mom didn't get before
sleeping on it and then taking it all for granted again.