Ian Doumit
What calls the forest home.
The wolf splits
like a cell
out from the shadow of the woods.
Slow like the framerate’s off, stops fast, no fear, no shame,
dead center ahead of our Chevy.
Half an hour
out from dawn.
Grey light heavy with silt
trickles down this one gravel lane rivulet,
eroding our way into druid green lodgepole pines, pastel aspen clones.
The sun barcodes the treetops in blue.
The wolf slips
like a prayer,
out from the word into the world,
a hypnagogic twitch, eigengrau blur, predator eyes down the doublebarreled snout.
Does not move.
Not a flinch.
Mushroom & resin
on the wind,
viscous on our skin, thick on this window.
Behind the wheel I can feel our taillights
tremble at the ready,
redeyed prey held fast with adrenaline.
There’s a sweaty two-person tent waiting for us under the Milky Way.
Couple lukewarm six packs of memories to crack but
it’s the British Columbia before
Christ I come back to.
The wolf strips,
like a solvent,
down to the bare wood that we once were, could be
without this algorithmic masculinity.
I & he lie naked, side by side,
out of words,
licking fur.
Ian Doumit is a writer based in Wichita, Kansas, by way of Alaska, Texas, and New Mexico. His background is in art history and food safety, and his work has been seen in Marble: A Journal Of The Arts, Dark Poets Club, and will be in the forthcoming Spring issue of Rawhead Journal. His poetry straddles the gap between the reasonable everyday world and those weird, irrational places where souls reside. Or something like that. Picture Whitman and Feynman grabbing a beer over Cards Against Humanity. He can currently be found decluttering his attic on Instagram and Substack @andpersend.