Ambient Creation Myth by Michael DuBon

star shining in night sky above misty forest

Photo by Adrian Infernus on Unsplash

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After Catherine after Joseph Campbell

Desire darting brown fox,

desire grey skulk coyote,

the devil and the fool,

harbingers of wildfire.

Desire breaks through the wild woman—

Longing breaks through the green man—

what petrichor gods, these tricksters—

Isn’t that how it is? A practical joke

by a deity of a world-ending flood

of unending desire, all starshine slick

with the wanting

between coyote and fox.

Destroy two worlds, these two,

in an advent calendar of solar flare

lovers, coyote aster, starfall fox,

eruptions of milky ways,

disruptors of marriages

and all future desires.

Unmoored in the white-hot void

coyote and fox play

with a ball of moon and sun,

pawing celestial spheres,

forgetting the game, their roles,

themselves, revolving their bodies

in the swirling lichen spores

to shape you and I.

Bio

Michael DuBon is a first-generation US citizen of Guatemalan descent and a first-generation college graduate. He is the author of the poetry collection Fragilidad y Free Dissociation (Girl Noise Press, forthcoming 2027), and his poems have appeared in The Meadow, The Museum of Americana, Shine Poetry Quarterly, and others. His creative nonfiction has appeared in The Plentitudes, Heartwood, and Under the Gum Tree. He holds an MFA from Saint Mary’s College of California and an MIS from Southern Utah University, and he is a tenured English professor at Everett Community College. He also volunteers as a board member at large for WTAW Press. At his most natural, he is laughing and smiling like no one is watching—because even his cat is over it and naps in the other room.