Emmett Till’s Glass Top Casket

          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.




"Emmett Till’s Glass Top Casket" by Cornelius Eady. Originally published in The New Yorker. All rights reserved. Reprinted with the permission of the author.