Because It's Monday

And Cornelius Eady is awesome. Here's his "Emmett Till's Glass-Top Casket" from last week's New Yorker:

     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.   

It's interesting because I don't totally understand this piece, and when I was younger that would have been a problem for me. But within the hour someone in comments will reveal the meaning. For me, the language, and actually the hint of meaning, is enough. I love the sinister "That's how the/possums found me, friend," and the reference to Till as "my young man."