While you were away I laid my body down
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.
When I think of you I dress for darkness
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.
La Nuit
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.
Jennifer Molnar
Jennifer Molnar is the author of the chapbook Occam's Razor, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in West Trade Review, Luna Luna Magazine, miniMag, Bellevue Literary Review, New South, Hawai'i Review, So to Speak, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from George Mason University and resides in New York.