The French language to you, was little more than an inheritance
It was the promise between mother and daughter that a grandchild ought to know the language they used

In Bonnyville, they occupy the church, the Sobeys, the liquor store with that butchered accent
The hybrid between Quebecois French and rural Albertan English - ugly, and indecisive

You don’t live in Bonnyville, where the French roam free
The French in Edmonton feels lost, almost unknown
Poorly funded buildings house these Franco-albertans - children with the same inheritance as you

Immersion becomes a ***** word,
worthy of contempt and disgust
All the French kids know each other,
forced to grow up together while being deprived of options
They all go to the same university - the small francophone campus which stands unimpressive in the only neighbourhood in Edmonton where stop signs say ‘arrêt’

Oil Country, home for the right and prosperous, they don’t like you
You, you’re Francophone -
Stuck up, ******, pretentious...
Besides, there are no such things as Franco-albertans.

What could you be other than an invented term by some lost souls?
You aren’t French enough -
Alberta is an English speaking province.

The time you went to France,
someone asked if you were French-Canadian
Before you could reply, your friends spun your story - something believable, commendable...
your parents, lived in Montreal, and moved to Alberta with their wholly French children

Your father grew up in Edmonton,
memorizing the parks and malls by name
while your mother lived on a dairy farm, living in french - the ugly acadienesque french.

But, to everyone around you, it’s much more believable that you are a stranger to this province.
Maybe you are.

Have you ever  seen anything so
barren as a neighborhood? I swear
even  the nature there  is  sterile -
narrowed  down  to  a  few  well-
behaved   bushes,   shaved   into
submission, bereaved of freedom.

i  miss the rebellion
of the trees
pushing defiantly even through
concrete to see the sky not silent
and  fearful like these
things crowded and compliant with no
room to breathe freely
do they even seem
alive

If want was water,
I would be drowning, my head under completely
and my oxygen quickly depleting.
If confusion was cold,
My fingers would be numb and I wouldn't even
have a coat to ward off the freezing.
If youth was you,
It would be slipping away by the second,
And I can't get a hold to stop it.
Now,
my air is gone,
I'm shivering to the bone,
and can't keep a hold on.
But, this is only a poem:
I know I'm not suffocating, subzero, or slipping.
But I can't help but feel like the more I write,
the farther I get from reality
and the closer I get to metaphor mortality.

You tend to me
in a way
no one else has before,
letting me grow
anew.