Writes of Spring celebrates 10th anniversary with baker’s dozen of poetry treats By: Ariel Gordon, photography by Mike Deal Posted: 12:00 PM CDT Friday, Apr. 25, 2025

Welcome to the 10th anniversary edition of Writes of Spring!

The traditional 10th anniversary present is tin or aluminum. For the last five years, we’ve published 12 poems. But this year, we splurged and selected 13, as an anniversary present to ourselves!

For 2025, we didn’t set a theme — as a gift for the poets — and we got 104 submissions. That’s the most we’ve ever received! At five poems per submission, myself and co-editor Charlene Diehl had as many as 500 poems to read.

But we had a great time, reading the poems to each other, trying to find the perfect mix of poems and people.

Nothing is perfect, but I am so proud of these poems and these poets, together and separately.

My thanks to Plume Winnipeg and to the Winnipeg Arts Council, who this year supported the poets’s fees.

Happy National Poetry Month! Poetry forever!

 

Jaime Laye Bouw

tattoo

there is a garden

where my breast used to be

flowers and petals

yellows and blues

all claim space where desire once lived

an explosion of beauty

my lover used to say

scar tissue now a garden

of forget me nots

 

Jaime Laye Bouw lives and writes on Lake Winnipeg.

 

Ava Stokke

People Watching

Sometimes I think of you in the pauses. I can see you standing on a street corner, delicate hands shoved in the pockets of your big brown overcoat, the one your father gave you for Christmas that makes you look like a skyscraper. When you board the bus, you rehearse what you’ll say when you get to the party, where you’ll stand next to someone I’ll never know; laugh at a joke I’ll never hear. Some mornings, when I look outside my window, the other houses look like you.

Ava Stokke a university student from Winnipeg currently studying law.

 

Rosanna Deerchild

mama’s walk

walk straight
mama said

keep your head up
my girl

but there are days
when my head bows

my body folds
into a question mark

days when i want to crawl
into an ending

i remember that story
of when mama was a girl

sent alone on the trapline
she walked straight

out of the bush broken but brave
i straighten my back

find my horizon
rise

 

Rosanna Deerchild is Cree from O-Pipon-Na-Piwan Cree Nation. She is the author of three books of poetry — this is a small northern town, calling down the sky, and she falls again — and one play, The Secret to Good Tea.

 

T.J. Evangelista

yama ko, kakai ko:

transformed expressions of a father-grandfather spirit

last weekend

my young daughter wanted

to hear my dad speak

Ibanag

and so she

asked him.

____voice changes. tone is different. shoulders soften;

___his whole body unclenches and relaxes

__He sits different —

_like sinking into a Lazyboy;

as breath     finds     tongue, they instinctively begin a dance;

_we hear a new kind of love frequency

__coming from the Ibanag

___that slightly shifts

____the vibrato beating of the heart

_____that lighter push-off from the diaphragm.

______when tongue     softens     thickens

_______ornamenting air like spun sugar cane.

I do not understand any

of the words

but I know that it feels familiar:

closer;

like home.

 

T. J. Evangelista is a prairie writer who enjoys learning about different cultures, listening to music, and spending time with her daughter. She studies Peace & Conflict at the University of Manitoba.

 

Denise Cook

Ashlee Shingoose

You shine today
You are not lost
You have strength
__You hold on
____You are not lost
You belong
___You always did
I knew you had a name
I knew I’d know you
______eventually
________Buffalo Woman
You are not lost
____Rest in LOVE
______Ashlee       ASHLEE

Denise Cook is mother of five, a beautiful sandwich of 2 girls, a son, then 2 more girls, her true loves. Gramma (loves that!) to 3 lovey grandsons. (Best love.)  North End (from and) to her heart. North End Women’s Centre Consequence.

 

Hannah Godfrey

Lovers who sleep

People pass, quiet as traffic,
by the kitchen window;
thank goodness you are in my bed.

There’s a fellow I know who stirs at 4
to write at 5 until, at 7,
his lover awakes with reliable desire
and hours pass before their salaries tug them apart.
The thought of them taps against me,
a cheap blind against a dark window,
while you lay sleeping.

My bed is our bed.
I woke with thoughts loose-limbed and tired;
you are curled up, alive and dreaming.

 

Hannah Godfrey (hannah_g) is a British-Canadian writer, artist, and curator. Her practice is informed by curiosity and delight, and recurring themes include home, recollection, queer echo-locating, & myth-making.

 

Marjorie Poor

There is the sidewalk underneath

after Sina Queyras’s “There was the moment of the puddle in the path”

And the sidewalk is cracked, opening to the world. The sidewalk is treacherous, uneven, malevolent in its intentions to trip you up, send you flying. The sidewalk only pretends to lie flat, passive, placid, but shifts all shifty, loosening bits of concrete to be kicked along. The sidewalk collects dried leaves, twigs, wishes, chips of glass that slice soles open. The sidewalk is imprinted with initials of lovers from when it was wet and new, the heart outline now broken and split. The sidewalk hides all this and more beneath the dark sheen of wide puddles in night rain.

 

Marjorie Poor is an editor and writer in Winnipeg, Treaty 1 Territory. She and Di Harms published a chapbook of centos, Voices [That] Haunt Us, with JackPine Press in 2024.

 

Anne Le Dressay

Winter night in flat Manitoba

You drive out of the city on a clear winter night
and turn off the main highway onto a road untroubled
by streetlights, and the land comes out of the dark
with its own light.

Winter stretches out to a horizon you’d forgotten was there,
winter broken here and there by the connect-the-dots
of fenceposts, or a blur of bush, or the geometric shape
of house or barn.

Sky expands and pulls away, lit by multiple stars.
(Who knew they are so many? Who knew they shine so bright?
Who knew they could be so impossibly close and so remote
at once?) And if the moon is big, night is almost day–
a ghostly landscape washed in pale blue.

The fields flow by, but the sky does not, its huge dome
unmoving above you, until the city begins to seem
the only place within human dimension.

And this is either fear

_____________or freedom.

 

Manitoba-born Anne Le Dressay has published three books and two chapbooks of poetry. After 41 years elsewhere, she moved back to Winnipeg in 2020.

 

Jean Chicoine

what? war?

la guerre est au sol, la guerre est dans l’air
elle rampe dans les villes, elle se traîne délétère
insulte à l’intelligence, bafouement des êtres
elle est surtout et avant tout dans nos têtes

elle est effet de perspective, elle est injure
blasfème, jeu de miroirs, bavant de blessures
clamant la paix dans ses dédales de tortures
elle est surtout et avant tout dans nos cœurs

nous en sommes toustes complices

toustes coupables

 

Bachelier en linguistique de l’Université de Québec à Trois-Rivières, Jean Chicoine a quitté le Québec pour le Manitoba en 1989 et vit dans le Village Osborne depuis 1990. Il a écrit toute sa vie, mais n’a publié que sur le tard.

 

Dana Medoro

A Sonnet

This is how it comes into being
by leaving winter’s signature stillness
the sunlight tilting into the center of things.
Spring gets inside, stumbling through open windows
pulling down glittering icicles,
carried by time and warmth
toward the earth.
The mud tracked across the floor
in paw prints so vivid in outline and heft
it seems like all wildness is contained there—
like something written
on a temple wall
something about wolves and searching
and the bright edges of the living.

 

Dana Medoro is Professor of American Literature at the University of Manitoba.

 

Spenser Smith

Catfish

The Assiniboine is still frozen but soon
it will break into a conveyor belt of ice
and litter. I will binge-watch this livestream
until the melt is complete and I can break
out my fishing gear. With a styrofoam box
full of worms, I will try to lure little catfish
from the riverbed. I imagine they take refuge
amongst the shopping carts and mattresses
this great city has discarded. No, concerned
Wolseley resident, I will not keep anything
I catch. I just like how they burp and gurgle,
their soft underbellies resting in my hands.

 

Spenser Smith’s debut book of poetry, A Brief Relief from Hunger, was published by Gordon Hill Press in 2023.

 

Demeter-Anemone Willow

All the Flowers Have Names

Whispered softly as I pass them

Chickweed and honeysuckle

Iris, ground ivy, cosmos, poppy, pansy, daisy

All the plants have names we have forgotten or never known

Speaking them gently on the breeze

Anemone, fern, lilac

They come forth in colour, lacing the air with fragrance

The beginnings of all fruit and all seed

Some sweet, some bitter

All to be tasted by the earth and the body

All to become the bearer of our futures

Our stories here to live on

Aster, goldenrod, hollyhock

Grasses combed by the wind, trees grown tall and deep rooted

Marigold, violet, sweet clover, dandelion

We will go on to know another life

Breathe the same air in different lungs

Use all that we have found

 

Demeter-Anemone Willow has been writing since they could write and telling stories for longer. Their work explores themes of nature, isolation, emotion, and longing.

 

Andrew Vaisius

Transit

It is dark
A woman waits for the light to change
I see her half a block away
no cars coming
the street deserted except for her
and I pass her
It is one of those long side street lights
She waits and waits and I wonder
if the light is malfunctioning
will she still be there in the morning
I’ll bring her coffee and croissants
discuss morning news
and last night’s concert
Meanwhile we’ll marry have kids
a house with a large bookcase
look sharp but finally fall
out of grace and divorce
The light blinks green and off we go
separately
in search of another light

 

Andrew Vasius was an Early Childhood Educator for over 30 years as well as being an editor, reviewer and poet. His work appears in five anthologies, over 20 periodicals, four chapbooks (the latest being Inveigh, 2024), and one book, Retirement, published by Flat Singles Press, 2020.