Urban Sprawl

It’s getting darker and the orange light gleams off the wet pavement, now I’m seeing things.

           It’s getting darker and the orange light gleams off the wet pavement, now I’m seeing things.
The apparition of a bus hisses past me, the streetlights splatter shadows out in front of me. Evening drunkenly sips up the last of the day's energy, as the sun summits the b-side of the mountainscape. City streams fringed by buildings 
          inch ever closer,
                    narrowing my escape.
                                Hurling me towards extinction.
          And yet, I do not go, I want to end where I began.
          So, into Spectre I stare, it’s not my time.
          Like clockwork, I meet myself over and over again. As the cicadas meet the May air.
         Anemoia soaks through my tee shirt, like sweat on a summer day, stowed away until the days feel real and fast. I miss the prairie plain, where the air is dry and the sky is cracked open by thunder.
         How I long for chinook to pick me up and carry me home, back to the strangers waiting for me in memory. When I hang off this earth, I wonder if my ancestors are watching me flail. These streets are too long to walk alone on.
         Where are the hands of those who have come before?

About the author

Micah Favel is a Plains Cree writer from Poundmaker Cree Nation, and they are of settler Scottish ancestry. They are currently in their final year of study at the University of British Columbia, majoring in Philosophy and Critical Indigenous studies. Micah’s writing has been featured in a Querencia Press publication.