Sharon Kunde received her PhD in English from the University of California, Irvine in 2018. Her research on nineteenth-century American literature shares with her poetry a concern with embodiment, relationality, nonhuman animals, and materiality. Her work is published or forthcoming with Twentieth-Century Literature, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Los Angeles Times, The Harvard Review, The Colorado Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and other journals. She lives in California with her husband, sons, and dog.
Stray
By the time I reach
the sidewalk I’m
too hot sky
orange with smoke
from this month’s fire
the terrier, tough
white tuft, gasps,
tugs, spins,
rattles out yaps
when she sees
the loping brown form –
coyote.
Eyes meet.
I see the creature
consider the lap dog:
threat or prey?
I recall
shivering in camp
while madman howls
rolled down from the hills;
the Humane Society’s warning
never to leave the lively mop
in the back yard at night:
too many little dogs
snapped up and swallowed whole
by their scuzzy cousins;
see cratered fur
gaunt frame
spindle legs
feet light
on the hot asphalt.
We three walk on,
the stranger in the road’s dead
center. When pet growls wild
dog turns harried eyes
and trots two steps.
At block’s end,
scissors into reluctant
canter toward the arroyo.
Poochie hunches in the parkway,
deposits glossy turds,
well-shaped remnants
of stuff called Science
Diet measured into her
bowl twice a day;
scrapes with zest
prances on the brown grass
lifts nose to sing
madman howls
roll down from the hills
the ugly cousin
now lost
to our terrible burning.