A Poem by Wren Tuatha

Tupelo Coyote

 

We were tracing Jack’s Creek

where the woods abducts it from the rolling

hills of dairy cows and tobacco.

I on the asphalt, you behind the tupelos.

 

You stalked me like a fan

afraid to ask for my autograph.

Those alien eyes,

calculating,

measuring my marrow

bend after turn, always

thirty paces aside.

 

Now you trot out in the farmlands,

legs like tobacco sticks, mapping the median line.

I am roadside, reading.

You are storybook real.

I speak to you, familiar,

as if you are the family dog.

Your answer is a glare-beam

that rips me, rights me.

 

You put me in the landscape,

that’s all.

 

 

 

First published in Canary, A Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis.

 

 

Wren Tuatha’s poetry has appeared or is upcoming in The Cafe Review, Canary, Peacock Journal, Poetry Pacific, Coachella Review, Arsenic Lobster, Baltimore Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Loch Raven Review, Clover, Lavender Review and Bangalore Review. She’s an editor at Califragile and PoetryCircle. Wren and her partner, author/activist C.T. Lawrence Butler, herd skeptical goats on a mountain in California.