I’m Rooting for the Coyotes

M. Miranda Maloney

June 2, 2022

We spent winter turning over mottled leaves, twigs 

and branches, limbs of Itztlacoliuhqui, the Aztec god 

of damp and dark, asleep or in decay. We unfolded chairs 

on warm days beneath trees, our mutt ran creeks amok 

with the chaff of plastic bits and bottle caps. I planned 

to return to this place in summer. Humidity, rain, or sweat 

weaving low to the bow of my back. But I don’t. Instead, 

I visited the Gulf, its beach bedecked with waving shades 

where children played. There was still a pandemic. 

Except the ocean carried none of it but for sticky waves. 

I may go to the desert. There, neighbors are losing pets 

to coyotes jumping over rock walls to devour their flesh, 

drink marrow like water. My heart breaks over their hunger, 

and thirst. I can’t help it. I’m rooting for the coyotes. I keep 

thinking if only the razing stopped, if only the scaling stopped 

for one more strip mall, to squeeze in one more house. If only 

I’d quit my want. But there are many like me. Searching 

the horizon, my eyes seek the slender shapes of creatures stirring 

farther where I cannot touch them, where I cannot hurt them, 

where their string of sound is lost at last. All I say, I’m sorry.

M. Miranda Maloney is the author of The Lost Letters of Mileva (Yuguri editorial, Uruguay, 2019), and Cracked Spaces (Pandora Lobo Press, Chicago), forthcoming in August 2021. She is the founder of Mouthfeel Press. She lives in Huntsville, Texas, with her husband, Dan, dog Caspian, and two cats, Edison and Oni. She has three children in college, attending Texas universities.