by Christine Rhein
10/31/25, for Rachel Jamison Webster
 |
| One year after Halloween incident, fear remains over immigration enforcement. —Evanston RoundTable, October 18, 2026 |
My friend bears witness, posts a video
from her front porch, tells of helicopters
that flew over her town all day today,
of the white, unmarked ICE vans
that cruised the streets, circled stores
and schools, one of the vans ramming
a car, the woman at the wheel pulled out,
pushed down, hauled away by men in masks.
This is real, my friend says, this is happening—
parents, teachers, guarding a grade school
for hours—the children kept inside,
wearing their costumes. No parade this year
through the neighborhood—princesses,
pirates, ghosts, superheroes, locked down.
It’s nighttime now—my friend posts again
with her porchlight on, and she’s smiling,
eager to let everyone know how her block
turned noisy after all, how the sidewalks
filled with laughing trick-or-treaters—
so many of them that she was worried
she’d run out of candy, but there was a boy
who saw she was holding one last little bar,
and said Here, I’ll give you some of my candy,
and then all of the kids in that huddled group—
a flock, she calls them, of eight- or nine-year-olds—
reached down into their bags, dropped sweetness
by fistfuls into her bowl. That way, they said,
there will be candy for the next kids.
Christine Rhein is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection, Swerve (Wayne State University Press) and of Wild Flight, a winner of the Walt McDonald Poetry Prize (Texas Tech University Press). A former automotive engineer, Christine lives in Brighton, Michigan.
