space
Making My Apology to the Possum
It starts the night I wander away from the
Camp Fire Girl circle. I come upon a possum
rooting around rotten apples, its yellow teeth
crunching the corpses of bees, quick killed
by the first hard frost. I can’t stop staring at its
tiny eyes, dense as the metal BB’s my mom
promised would blind me.
It picks up again when I drive in the new moon dark
for my graveyard shift at the hospital. A possum crosses
the road at just the wrong time. My penlight
used to assess pupil responses, casts a circle of light
over her tiny pink joeys and swollen nipples. I’ve killed
an entire translucent family and worry it’s a bad omen
for the next twelve hours.
I am pregnant and search for a bag of daffodil
bulbs, compelled to domesticate our five acres
wild with thistle and nightshade. I need to bury
these bulbs before the ground freezes. It resumes
in the shed as I reach into a bucket filled with corn
to touch whiskers. A possum, day-stunned, squints up
at me. I dump the bucket clap my hands, prod
it with a rake to cast it out. I resist this possum totem.
I rub my belly—worry my baby is birth-marked.
The spring of the hundred-year-flood, my daughter
rescues a joey alone and shivering in our ditch. She lines
a box with outdated calendar pages and we name
the baby Monet. She trickles a potion of condensed milk
and Gatorade into its mouth every few hours. I stare at its face
searching for some secret message. In years to come
will she research possum resistance to rabies or the genetic
code of its prehensile tail? In three days it grows
strong enough to hiss, so we turn it loose.
Decades later during a stretch of sub-zero days, a fat
grizzled possum works her way into our chicken coop. The
cinnamon queen hens squawk and boycott laying. I will urge
her out before my husband finds his rifle. In April
when she’s nursing her passel I will gift
her with oak leaf lettuce and gleaned corn kernels.
b
No Way to Timber your Silence
You felt safe, sheltered in place under
weeping willows on the edge of a
stagnant lake perfect for leeches and mosquito
egg hatches. You followed deer paths between
burr oaks and buckeye trees—its nuts, bark and leaves
toxic to children and livestock, like your father’s
mix of moods.
The smell of leaf rot and black walnut
shells still makes you salivate—the texture of muck
as you dug with a plastic shovel and sharp
sticks looking to discover museum treasures—arrowheads
shed antlers, raccoon skulls waiting to be carbon
dated. Your father was staking the corners of his dream
house with no money to dig a foundation.
One autumn afternoon you dropped out of sight
in a hollow box elder. He roamed the land for hours
repeating your name in a range that changed from boredom’s
baritone to the soprano of terror. You tucked down deeper
hoping the tree trunk could dampen his anger, you wanted
to reach for him but couldn’t call out, couldn’t even whisper.
b
b
Midwest Review 