Over years we lifted it sometimes
from its cardboard box, studying
the fifty teeth and gazing into the open
eye sockets, this possum skull we found
in our sixth year, half-buried in the dirt
behind the rental house. For decades, then,
we moved it everywhere we went,
and always it lay quietly, as patient as dirt,
and only now and then did I imagine it
dreaming that skin formed once more around
its body—the moon face and moon tail—
so it might waddle again along the river.
This poem was originally published in The Florida Review (43.2, Fall 2019) and was a runner-up in the Humboldt Poetry Prize.