Watch Out for Icicles
A coyote barks at the moon like it owes him money,
sharp and mean against the soft
cotton sheets of this desert night.
He doesn’t know there’s no moon tonight—
just a ghost of it,
hiding like me.
I’m wrapped up in this landscape,
and by wrapped, I mean tangled.
Mesquite thorns snag my jeans,
sand pours into my boots,
and somewhere, a cactus laughs in needles
The stars don’t help;
they’re too busy being eternal
to care about my flashlight battery.
So I follow the coyote’s nonsense song,
trusting his anger more than my map.
When he stops barking,
I stop too—
and there it is:
the smell of something green
in a world of dust.
Deron Eckert
Deron Eckert is a Pushcart-nominated poet and writer who lives in Lexington, Kentucky. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Appalachian Review, Atlanta Review, Wild Roof Journal, Blue Mountain Review, Rattle, Stanchion, The Fourth River, and elsewhere. He can be found on Instagram at @deroneckert.