As a boy I would complain whenever we made the endless journey east of Calgary across Canada’s bread basket. A featureless, forever stretch of nothingness with, well, nothing to capture a young boy’s attention other than occasional dead gophers on the roadside or small town pee stops. Now, I look for any opportunity to revisit this vast and open trip to bountiful.

Go ahead and stretch,

let your long arms reach,

your flayed and flowing skin

bulge and billow under concrete veins.

This wide, broad vulnerability,

awake to all, invisible to none,

becomes the soles of our feet.

And so we walk, we walk, and still we walk.

But, alas, you deceive and taunt

with a belly, full and warm

but strong and endless

where here never quite meets there.

In such horizontal places

all tomorrows become today.

Then becomes now.

There becomes here,

where it is we stand.