I have another poem from Writing in the Dark’s WANTED intensive to share with you!

Week five explored desire as a threshold for transformation. The prompt (and my poem) was inspired by James Wright’s “The Blessing,” which ends with the line: “Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom.”

We were asked to write down four memories of being undone by something non-human. Two of my memories would have brought me back to the ocean themes I explored at the beginning of this intensive. But I chose instead to write about my encounter with a coyote.

You’ll find the poem (as well as a picture of my new coyote tattoo!) below.

If you want to find out what my other three memories were and how this poem was pieced together, I’ve shared a bonus-content post on my Patreon (for both free and paid subscribers).

The Coyote

In the stucco and bougainvillea belly
of a historic Phoenix neighborhood I let
devour me, the streetlights leak into tawny lakes
of fluorescence on the sidewalks. The day’s heat
rises off the asphalt beyond the sun’s absence,
and a coyote lopes out from the night-
curtained depths of the front yard to the left
of my partner and me. He crosses our path at a trot,
so nonchalant—head neutral, tail relaxed.
If he could speak, he’d say, “Pardon me,
just cutting through.” And if I were to reach across
the stretch of false sun and concrete landscape between us,
I could grasp his layered-desert fur, mottled like a paint brush
dipped in white, then wheat, then ochre. We could be
a lamppost, a cactus, a stone wall, we’re so still.
No sense of threat or fear enters my mind.
If I stepped out of my body, I would break
into a song of claw and teeth, sharp enough to bite
through the yearning.