Possum Town

Two poems by Kendall Dunkelberg

Below are two poems by Mississippi poet Kendall Dunkelberg, whose Rooted interview was published earlier this week. “Possum Town” was part of Kendall’s second collection, Time Capsules, and “Beso con Lengua” is included in his forthcoming collection, Tree Fall with Birdsong. You can see Kendall at an upcoming reading at Friendly City Books in Columbus on June 5 or at Lemuria Books in Jackson on July 24.

Possum Town

I really must claim this place more fully
now I have lived here six years and in the past
year gotten married, bought a house, begot a child.
With each new planting— oak leaf hydrangea,
jasmine, and tea olive in the yard; the rooms painted
and remodeled in the house; the baby growing
in the womb—despite all my misgivings,
I set deeper roots into this soil.

One morning, walking the dog, to the river, 
I encounter a dead possum on the side of the road, 
and a little further on, a badger, whose white
buck teeth grinned at me a few days before I found
this possum’s bloody smile, which reminds me now
of Spirus Roach, whose nose, in local legend,
caused the Indians to dub the settlement
Possum Town, though the locals would later
change the name to Columbus as they changed
nearly all the named streets to anonymous numbers
in all four directions, much to the confusion
of spring tourists who come for a taste of the
Old South but can’t tell Third Street from
Third Avenue North or South. In this town
history is everywhere yet leads nowhere; it has
been whitewashed and spoon fed in October parades
and April Pilgrimage Balls. But Mr. Possum’s
beady eyes and proud nose remind me there
is more to this place than its cleaned-up exterior.

The possum and badger lived along the banks
of the Tombigbee long before this town’s namesake
claimed to discover this half of the world, long
before the Choctaw migrated here or were force-
marched on to Oklahoma, and long before the civil war
that marks the end of history in all the local brochures.
The land itself bears the scars of our civilization.
Its history lives on in place names like Burns’ Bottoms,
a low, swampy area where freed slaves once settled.
Though not on any map, these names are still used,
making this town not so different from any other
in America where the real past has been replaced
with a plastic present of Walmarts, McDonalds,
Expresslubes and a hundred other chains that dot
the main drag and cause this town to look, smell,
and taste like any other. Yet scratch the surface,
and the past bleeds black and white, Chochtaw,
Chinese, and Mexican, unrest and culture,
like anywhere else in American where our
contradictions breed discord and complexity.


Beso con Lengua

Back when I lived in Chicago and still ate meat,
my roommates and I loved to go to taquerias, 
where you could get real barrio food, not
the Americanized fare that passes for Mexican 
in Mississippi. Yet my roommates never
dared to try my favorite, tacos con lengua,
a cross-cultural glossolalia wrapped in tortilla.

Tongue wasn’t so foreign to me. My mother grew up
eating it on the farm and passed it on to us, buying 
gigantic beef tongues, studding them with cloves 
and boiling them in her biggest stock pot. We loved  
to eat it hot with horseradish or cold in a sandwich, 
the sensation of the cow’s big, tender taste buds 
on our own was our favorite part, a culinary french kiss
long before we became aware of the opposite sex.

Still, now that I’ve moved to the South, I’m glad
I’ve become a vegetarian. I don’t have to draw
the line at chitlins: somehow, intestine on intestine
doesn’t have quite the allure of tongue touching tongue.
And I really have no desire to suck the flesh from
between the toes of a pig, pickled or otherwise.

Yet I have to admire the honesty of using
every part of the animal you eat, in the way
that as a boy I admired the idea of the Get Smart
Sandwich at the drive-in in Belle Plaine, Iowa,
but never could quite stomach the reality
of scrambled brains on a sesame bun.

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Kendall Dunkelberg directs the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing and the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium at Mississippi University for Women. He is editor of Poetry South and has published three collections of poetry, Barrier Island Suite, Time Capsules, and Landscapes and Architectures, as well as the creative writing textbook, A Writer’s Craft: Multi-genre Creative Writing. His fourth collection, Tree Fall with Birdsong will be published by Fernwood Press in May 2025. His poems have recently appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, River Mouth Review, Peauxdunque Review, and Salvation South, and he has poems featured in Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology and Southern Voices: Fifty Contemporary Poets. Find him on Bluesky, Mastodon, Instagram, Threads, and Facebook @kdunkelberg and at kendalldunkelberg.com.