This piece is part of the Imagined Histories folio, which features art by Devyn Mañibo.

Somewhere in rural Alberta
there is a trail

overgrown with young fear
and there is a lake

I can no longer remember
perfectly. It spills

outside its oblong shape
like the sudden

and consuming darkness
of a prairie sky at night.

The peaks of this memory
sharpen

corrugated with the aspen
of my childhood 

and rhizomatic fields sown
with the past selves

I never loved.
Then the lake shifts

into another form
another glaze

of land that enthrals
the nearby elk.

Two of them walk
into this memory so easily

as if this place that exists
only in my imagination

is their home,
as if they are crossing

a border that I find myself
unable to cross

even now, years later,
drawn northward

to that vanishing landscape
I tried so hard to forget –