"Emmett Till's Glass-Top Casket" by Cornelius Eady

By the time they cracked me open again, topside, abandoned in a toolshed, I had become another kind of nest. Not many people connect possums with Chicago,

        but this is where the city ends, after all, and I float still, after the footfalls fade and the roots bloom around us. The fact was, everything that worked for my young man

        worked for my new tenants. The fact was, he had been gone for years. They lifted him from my embrace, and I was empty, ready. That’s how the possums found me, friend,

        dry-docked, a tattered mercy hull. Once I held a boy who didn’t look like a boy. When they finally remembered, they peeked through my clear top. Then their wild surprise.

From The New Yorker, April 5, 2010

View: Cornelius Eady reads his poem, "Emmett Till's Glass-Top Casket"