Binary Stars
That night, he convinced me
to come with him, to drive a winding road
to nowhere, fierce and lovely. To see
the cut-paper shadows the moon splayed on the grass,
while black oaks whirled past us, dark sentinels
against the hillsides that breathed.
For a moment, around a curve,
the moon slid across my window
as if the earth were turning with us.
The fields were glowing
with the pale intensity of asphodel,
and the contour of every momentary mountain
carved ridges jagged, almost tactile. Beside me,
he was true as all of this. An insistence
of some force or magic that said,
“I’ve got you, I’ve got you,”
while he bargained with velocity,
made laughing, tenuous promises to gravity.
When the owl came down
into the headlights,
for a moment, it looked like an angel,
radiating a golden light even as the wings
split on the windshield,
and the wind stole the feathers it could—
I imagined handfuls
spiraling into the night like comets,
and the pale body vanished
with the breath our lungs released.
I realized
I’d grabbed his hand in both of mine,
but he was the one who held them
as we rounded another curve.
Who were we to soar like we did?
I watched the moon turn
in its celestial eddy, and felt
that for all his focus on the road,
he was watching me, somehow,
and I thought then
that we would always, always
be on some dark and gorgeous highway,
whirling, revolving,
haunting each other like ghosts.
.
Twelve Point
— After the video, “Sika Buck Wanders Around With The Decapitated Head Of Another Buck Locked In His Antlers”
His enemy’s head is snarled in his antlers,
a dark, fouling nest tangled in branches white as death,
the points locked like it was destiny, like
I’ve got you, and I’ll never let go. Its face,
shedding hair fine as eyelashes, hangs against his temple,
as if there were a tenderness in death, and I wonder,
if he can smell a doe from a half-mile away,
what must he be thinking now? The way death permeates,
makes a grave of every meadow, makes a tomb
of every bed. I wonder how long it took him
to tear the skull away from sorry body, how he had
to wait for the rigor to pass, tendons and tissues
giving up their hold while these males
grew close as lovers, and, when he finally came away
with that wretched keepsake, if he really thought, I’m free.
I look into those dark eyes
and hear every prayer I’ve ever spoken
that things wouldn’t get any worse.
After all, somebody had to win.
But look at him: sometimes victory
is just a corpse you carry with you.
.
Cami DuMay is an undergraduate at UC Davis, pursuing a degree in English with an emphasis in creative writing. Her work has appeared in Hare’s Paw, Dipity Lit Mag, Burningword, and more. She writes about myriad aspects of life, from intimacy and trauma to nature and insects, but has a particular fascination with the intersection of nature, madness, and secular worship.
Stone Poetry Quarterly 