Subimos Coyotes (We Mount Coyotes)

by Esénia Bañuelos

  1.

The moon once asked me, “Why don’t you try sleeping to music?”

      2.  

In the thick of moonbeams, there is life where motion cameras do not stir–

a country dance folds at the Calumet’s hips, and my steed stargazes

betwixt her lips, a Hegewisch March that spits and floods to coexist–

coyotes, congenital to a broth south of Michigan.

 

3.

How could I help, but pile my pillows, scale the skeleton,

and listen as far as the moon let me?

4.

The sun once advised me, “Twenty-four hours of rain. Good for dreams.”

 

5.

When all the bones quieted, Mama would present my limp torso to the eidolons–

burrowed in a cave far from the teeth of jackals, a dirt table within the thicket,

where a nesting coppice would teethe on women who desired mounting. We posed,

netting the sight through freedom between our fingers, and awaited us. We came,

folded neatly in a kaleidoscope folklorico, leaping salmon against the humus stream,

atop those nags of the ‘tide – coyotes, congenital to a cave south of any man’s knowedge.

                      

                                                                       6.

                                        How could I help, but be among the flood?

                                                                                                                                                                                             7.

                                                        I always respond, “I do not need to be asleep to dream.”

 

          9.

Both our legs bound to their right hips, hand raw by playing in the mane of emancipation.

There were no matracas to rally us, lest we wanted the men and their horses to awaken–

so, together, unbeknownst to the sleeping, we watched them from our windows,

kneeling on our pillow-stadium seats, those coyotes, dancing loose in the plains,

where not a ray, or a lone car light, would crush them between their jaws.

                                                                        10.

                                 How could I help, but wait to see those free women?

Esénia Bañuelos is a mixed Mexican-American poet of Wixárika descent from Chicago, Illinois. She is an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr College majoring in Linguistics and English. Her work has been nominated for the 2025 Best of The Net Prize in Fiction, and can be read in The North Dakota Quarterly, The Maine Review, Thirty West Publishing, The Allegheny Review, and The Saranac Review.