Eighteen words and a title are enough for Dave Bonta to put a feast, a funeral and a resurrection on the same table. The scene is a holiday meal, and the second line drops in the word "dead" without explaining it. Who are the dead? They might be the ancestors whom holidays tend to summon, the unseen guests at the family gathering. They might be the food itself, since a holiday spread is mostly animals that were once alive. Or they might be the other diners, sunk in a stupor of overeating. The poem never chooses. Whichever reading you pick, the man at the centre is eating "in the midst of the dead" and is in danger of joining them.
Then comes the rescue, and it is wonderfully undignified: "a finger down his throat / brought him to life again." The central idea is the odd closeness of appetite and mortality. Feasting looks like celebration, but it can leave a person numb, stuffed and half-dead. What revives him is not prayer or music but a gag reflex. Life returns through emptying, not filling.
That is where the title earns its keep. "Making room" suggests the practical aim of a person who wants space for more food. It also suggests making room for the living among the dead, and for breath in a body crowded with feast. A reader may even hear the plain social sense of shuffling chairs to fit someone at the table. A single phrase carries greed, survival and hospitality at once.
The construction is spare. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letter, so the poem looks as casual as a note scribbled on a napkin. The two couplets do the work that punctuation might have done. The first is a pair of fragments with no verb at all: "holiday eating / in the midst of the dead." It reads like a caption, a frozen picture, and "eating" as a present participle keeps the meal going on without end. The second couplet finally gives us a person ("his throat"), a verb ("brought") and a completed action. The grammar moves from stillness to event, matching the jolt of the gag. The white space between the couplets works like a held breath before it.
The lines are short and nearly even, running five, six, six and six syllables, with two or three strong beats each. That keeps the voice flat and deadpan, as if reporting something ordinary. Small sound echoes sit under that flatness. "Brought" and "throat" nearly chime, though they do not quite rhyme. The short *i* of "in," "midst," "finger," "him" and "his" runs through the poem like a repeated tap. The last word, "again," quietly suggests that this has happened before and will happen next year, since holidays come round on a cycle.
The word choices set solemn language against a crude act. "Midst" is a slightly old-fashioned word, and "in the midst of" may recall the burial-service phrase "in the midst of life we are in death." Bonta turns that around: here a man in the midst of the dead is brought back to life. "Brought him to life again" sounds like the language of miracles, yet the miracle is a finger and a throat. That bathos is the joke. It is also the point, because the body's humblest mechanisms are what actually keep us alive. The poem does not say whether the man is choking, gorging or deliberately purging, and each reading gives the finger a different meaning. It might be first aid, a bad habit or a grim ritual of excess.
The poem matters because it does so much with so little. It is funny and unsettling at once, and it never tells us which feeling to trust. It avoids a moral and lets the images argue. Holidays are supposed to be about abundance and remembrance, and the poem suggests that too much of either can smother us. The man comes back to life only by getting rid of what he has taken in. It is a small, strange poem, and the effect lingers like the memory of a very large dinner.