i looked tonight at the list of names we might have given to our children.

this is not a poem.

this is an invitation.

please come home.

Allow me to romanticize.

Bring me to the small Alberta towns (Stavely, maybe?) and sit with me in the quiet dark and eat the small-town Chinese food.

Chinese Cafés are immortal and gone away.

I am a Manitoban body, with ruddy skin red around the nose, hands that remember the earth, a tongue that recalls a Slavic language like an embrace imagined from old love stories.

But I have an Albertan soul.

So let’s go through the fields, out of Edmonton, beyond Red Deer, because I have spent too long longing for some ties to my distant Ukrainian roots, too long imagining another narrative.

There is an Albertan culture and I want to discover it for myself. I want to enter the prairie and sit, eat the Chinese, Japanese, Ukrainian food so that I might be.

I don’t mean to misappropriate. Tell me your history. My spirit was an immigrant too.