By Cami DuMay
You write what you need to.
Once, when I was a kid, I saw a carcass in the woods,
back behind my house. A deer collapsed in the humus,
her skull still partly clothed in tawny fur, eyeless sockets,
holes so black I felt myself pitching into their gravity. Here, a leg,
and there, white peering from dead leaves, a section of spine;
and that rib cage, broad and trimmed with dark and desiccated tissue,
made her look like a ship hauled up to dry dock,
if the sides of a ship could open and seem to breathe.
I came back a few days later to see her, and again after,
long after the last bones were skulked off by the creatures
who knew her better than I did. I came back and back,
and knew that somehow she was still there, wasn’t she?
And I think that’s what it’s like,
when lying awake I touch my body, come back, back
to the places I’ve died
as if that makes them holy.
Cami DuMay is a poet and a recent graduate of University of California Davis, where she majored in English with an emphasis in creative writing and minored in entomology. She will be continuing her education in poetry as a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers in the fall of 2024. While she writes about myriad aspects of life—from intimacy and trauma to nature and insects—she has a particular fascination with the intersection of nature, madness, and secular worship.