All My Friends (poem)

Nowhere else will you see coyotes in the hills but also downtown,

racing the railcars, clicking the pavers, standing in lines for avocado toast.

They’re there and no one cares their coming down from the Hollywood

sign to prowl poolside and yip and scavenge and scrap, and they’re waiting

for the baker,

the butcher especially,

to set his bags outside the Whole Foods Market and for

the last bus from Disneyland home.

In packs of two or four they go about the dusk like landbats low and

hunched, I

see them asleep at Skidrow bus stations,

I see them dead sometimes in the middle of fast roads.

They are all of them wornout with coarse fur and thin middles and stained

molars and eyes like flashing cameras and noses like fuzzy microphones.

Coyotes don’t have Alphas,

they have weakest links.

In sunsetting cities they withdraw cash from ATMs they don’t have

and sleep near neon lights

and howl in tongues foreign to tell the moon goodnight.