December 15, 2025
can you feel it? there’s this sense of unease in the air that lingers like the smell of diesel and the feeling of dusty ice in our mouths and sinuses.
it’s just a forest service road and old TVs shot to shit out in the open field, spent bullet casings and beer cans, an old mattress filthy on the ground where even heaven can’t bear to look.
it’s in the forest raves by the old waterfall and everyone drops acid and has dreadlocks and crystal necklaces. it’s in good weed smoked out of shitty bongs quoting trailer park boys and corner gas. it’s that meter in our voices when we punctuate our sentences with “eh” and drink down our timmies.
it’s in the way cute girls with expensive dye jobs scarf down poutine in the streets at 3am.
you can feel it on reservation highways past the pow wow grounds like you’re hearing drums and dancers. it’s loud amongst our awkward french and signs acknowledging indigenous territories and sacred spaces and churches standing forlorn amongst mountains and parking lots.
i feel it amongst my people, in the punk houses and student apartments and at farmer’s markets and the old haunted art gallery.
when the summer sun hits the sagebrush and bakes rattlesnake blood and coyote whispers and we smoke cigarettes on front porches and watch stupid guys in white oakleys cruise down main street blasting dubstep.
it’s a winter morning and someone shovelled your driveway for you and someone else says “she’s greasier than fuck out there, bud”.
we live our lives in forests and city streets and on the reservations and ranches. we are wild wretched things haunting old blue hockey arenas that we sometimes call “barns”.
there’s the guy with braids and a cowboy hat at the shop selling coffee and bannock and he talks about sacred teachings with kind eyes and rough hands.
and it’s there in the stuffy vintage blouses of the ladies handing out pamphlets about jesus outside the bank.
and we breathe it in along with the sage and water of the two rivers, inhaled alongside road grime and diesel and the dead deer along the highway.
it is home.
hospital vespers 