Bleeding Out on Cayuga Lake
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.
Leah Skay
Leah Skay is an author from Delaware. Her work has recently appeared in BULL, 45th Parallel, The Quarter(ly), HAD, and others. She received her B.A. in Creative Writing from Ithaca College and is currently the Poetry Editor for The Bloomin’ Onion. Outside of her writing, Leah lives in Brooklyn, NY, and is a proud alumna of the Japanese Exchange and Teaching Program. You can find all of her work listed at leahskay.com