Year of the Sasquatch | Sharon Kunde

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.     StrayBy the time I reach the sidewalk I’m too hot skyorange with smokefrom this month’s firethe terrier, tough white tuft, gasps, tugs, spins,rattles out yapswhen she sees the loping brown form – coyote.Eyes meet.I see the creatureconsider the lap dog: threat or prey?I recallshivering in campwhile madman howls rolled down from the hills;the Humane Society’s warningnever to leave the lively mopin the back yard at night:too many little dogssnapped up and swallowed wholeby t