West Hills

BY NATALIE KORMAN.

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The coyote came down
from the tinderbox mountain,
from the hills where the soil slipped,
to nose about the anchored earth,
where the water pooled as it did not up there.

Where the grass grew 
in sleek, burnished rectangles, 
she slunk about the lemon tree
and the once-simmering tar pathway,
now cool in the nighttime air. 

Detecting a meal
but not finding it, she squatted
near the quick-ripening tree,
then lapped the stream 
running down the tar path
and loped back into the crumbling red hills,
comfortably warm and 
unbearably dry.

---

Natalie Korman is a poet and writer. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Heliotropics (dancing girl press). Her poems have also appeared in Vagabond City, 99 Pine Street, Echoes, and Quarto, among others. An alumna of Barnard College, she was the 2012 first-place winner of Barnard's Prescott Prize for Prose Writing. You can find more of her work at www.nataliekorman.com.