Coyote
to my car, followed me
past the tumbleweeds, past
the wagon wheel splayed
like a heart in the desert
weeds – cooing baby, sweet
thing, circling to my back. Said he knows
a place we can be alone. Said he wants
to tell me a story.
I’d heard about this one’s long
tail, his quick tongue, and I said
he’d best shut his mouth
so I could drive.
What if he took me
beneath the water tower
and never said a word? What if
I rode him hard in the backseat
of that sedan, or hooked my boots
over his shoulders, told him
to lick each one, heel to tip?
Coyote, I can make
my own stories, will make
and make long after you’ve run dry.
Mama warned of those that bite:
mosquito, rattler, coyote.
Mama, be damned. Your daughters
all got teeth, too.
“Coyote” originally appeared in the Summer 2012 issue of Southern Humanities Review and has been reprinted here with permission of the author.
Dana Koster was a Wallace Stegner Fellow and a 2012 recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Indiana Review, PN Review, The Cincinnati Review and EPOCH, among others. She lives in California’s Central Valley with her husband and young son.
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