Writes of Spring City poets take on the Winnipeg 150 theme: ‘Our shared stories. Our shared future.’ By: Julian Day and Ariel Gordon Posted: 12:00 PM CDT Friday, Apr. 26, 2024

2024 marks a notable year: the 150th anniversary of Winnipeg’s first city council meeting.

So, for the ninth edition of Writes of Spring, we asked Winnipeggers to write to the city – travelling from its complicated past to its potholed present. We asked, where we go from here and how do we get there?

We received terrific responses and, from the many dozens of submissions, had the difficult task of selecting just a handful of poems. We received work in English and French, short and long poems, prose and found poems, all of it speaking to Winnipeg, its history, and our place within it.

We would like to thank everyone who answered the call for submissions. We would also like to extend a special thanks to McNally Robinson Booksellers and John Toews, who every year provide us with an incredible space in which to launch the feature.

This is a project of the Winnipeg International Writers Festival and the Free Press, but this year, the Assiniboine Credit Union provided support. Thank you!

The Writes of Spring poets will read their work Sunday at 2 p.m. at McNally Robinson Booksellers Grant Park. We’d love to see you there!

Kerry Ryan

Ode to the neighbour who maintains the street drain

Every April, he hatches out of winter
with his long-handled chipper
and gets down to business.

Thaw is his busy season:
double shifts, working holidays.
Smashing ice for greater digestibility,
feeding meltwater to the sewer’s lip.

Day after day, he’s out there,
shoes unequal to the task,
windbreaker unzipped
to free the steam of his work.

The rest of us cruise through,
resigned to the swamp between
my house and his, deeper every year.

Every block has one. Fastidious, driven.
Chip, chip, chipping away for all of us.
I only recognize him from a distance.

Kerry Ryan’s three poetry collections include Diagnosing Minor Illness in Children (Frontenac House, 2023). She was shortlisted for the 2022 CBC Poetry Prize.

Hanako Teranishi

‘flat jap’

My hands slip between my thighs,
over my gradual hills
across the valley between mounds,
marked by a converging stream
running down my core
where prairie soils wombs
the harvest’s bloom-
is rooted in decay,
years of abuse.
I yearn to spade my mounds
cutting, chopping.
Tearing out the roots, the rot.
Desolate soil!
Not even potatoes will grow.
Crows circle crops.
Ravens call kin to feast.
Winter’s kiss smothers
my tumbling river.
A crimson moon dawns.
Kisetsu wa yoideshyou.¹

 

¹ “the season will be good”
Hanako Teranishi (they/them) is a queer, Yonsei, mixed Japanese Canadian.

Kate Sjoberg

about last night (men talk to me about my work)

no i don’t care about your stolen bike, and no your stolen bike is not a deterrent to the active transportation movement, and no i dont care about your stolen bike and no i dont care about the insurance and no i dont care about locks and no i dont care about where you left it and no it wasnt more or less safe than anywhere else and no i will not serve the ukrainian refugee family you are helping before other refugees or indigenous kids made strangers to their own homelands, and no i dont care about your stolen bike, and the only cyclists and potential cyclists you care about are white, and you will tell me again and again about your stolen bike, and i will tell you there are more than enough bikes in winnipeg for every person to have more than one bike and you will tell me again and again and again about your stolen bike, and want arrests and want deterrents and I will give you a bike, I will offer you a bike, and you will tell me again and again and again about your stolen bike and I will tell you about poverty and you will tell me about your stolen bike, the one that was stolen before you bought another one, and no I don’t care about your stolen bike.

Kate Sjoberg lives in Winnipeg leading meditation groups, teaching politics and organizing at the University of Winnipeg, and working at Main Street Project.

Tamar Rubin

Slow leak

Before you realize the toll
of the water bill on your mental
health — before you enter
a series of five meaningless
numbers into an online

account — before milk, love, air
continue to squeeze forward
in pipes, and every second, a fraction
spills out — somewhere

the source of city water, Shoal Lake
turns to wet drywall, feeds melancholy
through indoor mold — a computer
calculating a fair exchange
for this —

You cannot count, but you imagine
droplets emptying a pool
of inner tubes, the way that filling
an unplanned, buried path
from your bathtub

to the reservoir — leaves you searching
behind insulation, dampness
for the errant nail, or hard line
on the tank that says: Stop
here.

Tamar Rubin’s first poetry collection, Tablet Fragments, was nominated for several awards including the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the McNally Robinson Book of the Year.

Conni Cartlidge

I Don’t Want to Write About Winnipeg

the defunct Selkirk−Winnipeg Bus
___ran every hour twice during rush hour
___carried us giddy girls finally allowed to travel
___alone

Portage Avenue between Eaton’s and The Bay
___me wishing I was cuter wishing I was older wishing I had more
___money

the sound of a woman’s bellows as she tumbled
___down the up escalator at a crowded downtown department
___store

brutalist Concert Hall bus stop bench that held
___me frozen during a forced first
___kiss

an old arena where I set myself on fire and ruined my black
___midi coat with a careless flick of my
___Rothmans

the Left Bank disco filled with desperate
___sweaty polyester
___hustlers

my Spence Street duplex
___with its peeping tom and upstairs
___abuser

the greasy woman on the Wolseley bus who cursed
___at me spit on my hair laughed as I fled
___with my first fiancé and our brand new
___marriage licence

cockroaches
___in the fourth floor Westminster walk-up
___where the hippies wanted all creatures to live
___free

Conni Cartlidge (she/her) is a retired early childhood educator and college instructor.

k. marie neufeld

Graffiti Confessions

Lost all hope?
__________Send love
into the ether
___Love the earth
______Love yourself
_before others can
Megan loves Dylan
______________and Ava
Benji
____♥’z
______Leah
I still
____love you
And I can hear
___the church
___________bells

k. marie neufeld is a Winnipeg poet and editor. Her work has appeared in Prairie books NOW, Vallum and Geez.

Louella Lester

Temperatures Rising

Unusual. Spring heat bleeds into the apartment. Sticks. Like my sweaty thighs, well into the night. Forever. The window is open and willing to accept any type of air. Finally. A whisk of breeze licks my shoulder and I drift off. Until. A chatty pair sifting the recycle bins below wakes me. Honks. Of Canada geese land on the roof next door. And. A feather of wind brushes my feet.

Louella Lester’s writing appears in many journals/anthologies and is included in Best Microfiction 2024. Glass Bricks (At Bay Press) is her first book.

Joel Caples

How La Fourche Became Nestaweya Again

Two rivers slice this city in thirds
or glue it together—it’s hard to tell
which is happening to us when we walk
through The Forks
together knowing
you were here first
and welcomed me
to enter a treaty in the works
since before I arrived with my
curiously high interest in trade
since before trade wasn’t enough
and the game became subsumption

It took a lot of guns to get the job done down south
but here a few empty promises were enough
to prove I had something to learn
about this utopia I dragged across the land
like a plow across a harvest-ready field

So how do we navigate this current? We follow
the rivers’ lead and gather
our muddy waters like a skirt
to give courtesy and wade into
the convergence of history and the continent
where treaties weaved in honour
will be watertight again
when I learn
to start
saying miigwech
at least

Joel Caples is a Treaty 1 writer from California, supported and inspired by his wife and their two talented teens.

Jody Baltessen

AND THE CLERK SHALL DULY RECORD…

Communications: William Ashdown, March 23, 1874

Requesting removal of a dead horse, which will soon be getting offensive.
Deposited in the vicinity of the New Methodist Church in the North Ward.

before there was a church, blessed
on a muddy street
______________bison gopher wolf hare
roamed there, followed their nature, a liturgy
of ligament skin muscle bone, wilded through
the ravage of seasons, of sky and sky and sky
the moon in her phases waning over
the final heave of body, all its elements in transit
blow fly, flesh fly, bloat, rupture
marbled veins, phosphorus and dry remains
transformed
__________into green unfolding
senega snakeroot, stinging nettle, sage
hyssop, sweetgrass, bee balm, yarrow

Referred to Mr. Ashdown
to find out who deposited the carcass on his ground where it lies.
And to the Chief of Police to compel removal by owner.

 

Note: Italicized text adapted from Minutes of the City of Winnipeg, 1874. City of Winnipeg Archives.

Jody Baltessen is a Winnipeg poet, writer and archivist (retired). Her work explores the materiality and layered meanings of place, records and the archive itself.

 Kristian Enright

Once Simulacra Rome for Trains

Imagined as produced by the same think tank that came up with “One Great City”

In the history of cities, ours is incredibly brief — as if the Ephemeral city.
An exiled suburbia-as-island, a good place to raise cherubim
to the sky’s fat air, not to let them fall into generic poverty that tragedy
watches Clockwork Orange-like in our downtown: our sky, dystopian

Our city, out of fashion, tries to beautify practicality, a train(ed) city
which could, which will: tough and gritty as the moon, sun’s brass

Shines as you will see below. Close readings are needed. In a moment
of panic, a camera sees the snowflakes, census for children’s ideas:
hieroglyphs as epitaphs upon hideographs. Hidden like the question:

Are we a Chicago of the North, lost, to those who stayed? What
affected tones in retail out of phase? Echo merely hollow … In a

Potentially centralized pothole: archeology for kids: a place land-locked.
Middle-sized city in a middle—see: Goldilocked: dug as capitalism
waned like Yukon calls for gold rushes, in vain. Midpoint fairy tales:
happily ever upon time’s circular / on track, we hope for a tundra-esque miracle.

Kristian Enright is a Winnipeg-based writer, educator and tutor who has a forthcoming book with Turnstone Press, Postmodern Weather Report.

Mary Horodyski

april, st boniface hospital

a kumquat tumbles from the gift basket & rolls across
the floor   my brother slaps it with the side of his boot
& it spins under the next bed
welcome to the seventh floor the bowel floor where inside
is out & entrails squeeze their murky contents thru clear
plastic tubes & collect in bags that clap
against the IV stands when the patients creep along the hall   except
my mother is not moving

the lady behind the curtain in the next bed is putrefying &
a noxious smell clings to every molecule
of air  my brother puts his paper coffee cup tight
to his face & breathes thru his tim horton gas mask   i hold my
scarf to my nose & smell my stale perfume

roll up the rim   roll up the rim   & win
i get please play again   please pay again   please pray again

i learn the hard way the front doors of the hospital lock at midnight
i stand in the wet dark & wave uselessly to my brother up above
me here below in the dank spring air of winnipeg   spring   when
all the old people tumble into beds of dirt or lift up & waft
like dandelion seeds &   everywhere   all the worms   everywhere
all the worms everywhere   dance

Mary Horodyski is an archivist, researcher and writer living in Winnipeg, Treaty 1 territory. After a long hiatus, she is writing poems again.

Laurent Poliquin

Dans les hauteurs du temps

le vent ivre joue de sa flûte entre les gratte-ciel
ses échos tulmutueux célèbrent une harmonie de hasard
des murmures gelés se rassemblent sur les rives d’une rivière
ils tissent la trame de destins à venir

ici les mots dansent tels papillons égarés
où chaque rue, chaque place, chaque recoin
cache le fragment d’un vaste rêve rebelle

libres et braves
des esprits ont sculpté des audaces
gravé d’innombrables promesses
comme autant de sentiers incertains
de ces reflets brillants
de yeux qui reviennent vers nous

Ô Winnipeg de joie extravagante
Ô doux éclats de rire immortels
tes boulevards bouleversent les festins de vie
où tout peut renaître léger
comme des alizés

Laurent Poliquin est un poète, artiste contemporain et éducateur franco-Manitobain. Parmi ses publications récentes on mentionnera Le guide ultime pour réussir sa recherche d’emploi au Canada (Primo mobile, 2024).