"A Woman Loses Friends" by Candice Kelsey

Sometimes the urban coyotes would jump her fence and piss on the trunk of her Japanese Pine; sometimes they would rub their faces on the gnarled stems of the aloe yucca. It was common practice to alert the neighborhood on the Nextdoor app. Coyote sightings generated a certain amount of commotion. In a sense, they had transformed from residents to animal control officers, always keeping watch.

She remembers reading a strange urban coyote story from “The Daily Dish” in The Atlantic many years ago. The writer had found dead house cats on her lawn; their bellies had been sliced down the middle, and all the organs were placed to the side. The carcass had been licked as clean as a bowl. Or an empty womb. It seems her friendships have been sliced, rearranged, and licked clean from the bowl of her life, small, feral sphere that it is.

CANDICE KELSEY is an educator and poet living in Georgia. She is the author of Still I am Pushing (2020) and won the Two Sisters Writing Contest (2021). Recently, she was chosen as a finalist in Cutthroat's Joy Harjo Prize.