We were warned at seventeen that home will always haunt us. We tucked the notion in our pockets with our parents’ worry and headed East to begin. The ghosts we kept stretched long inside us, threatening to break wide the circuitry of concrete cities. Eager at twenty-five to forget how long a voice roars through miles of open space. But we couldn’t be held back from the whitest of winters, when even midnight gleams. All the shrouded land shrieking light into the night. We were stirred not by the stars, but the hollows between them. We fell flat-backed in cold fields, noses to the sky, baying at every phase of the moon. Will they say we’ve settled when our bones turn to dust?

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Kim Mannix is a poet, journalist, and short fiction writer living in Sherwood Park, Alberta. More of her writing, and many of her rambles, can be read at makesmesodigress.com.