Going with the flow

For the 11th year of Writes of Spring, co-editor melanie brannagan frederiksen and I asked Manitoban writers to send us poems on the theme set by the League of Canadian Poets: Land & Sea.

We wanted to know: what does it mean to live in a province at the centre of Canada that still has 645 kilometres of coastline?

Lake Winnipeg is the 12th largest lake on Earth, with the largest watershed of any lake in this country. Not only that, but Winnipeg is criss-crossed with fresh water, from the Red River to Omand’s Creek. What does it mean, in the midst of all that water, to live on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene Peoples and the homeland of the Métis Nation?

Basically, we asked Manitobans to describe their relationship with water and land in poetry.

Over the course of this cool and wet spring, melanie and I read and re-read the poems before settling on what we think are 12 very different and very interesting poems.

We are happy to announce that going forward, the Winnipeg Arts Council has committed to paying the artist’s fees. We’re also happy to continue our partnership with Plume Winnipeg and McNally Robinson Booksellers, with a special thanks extended to John Toews, McNally’s event co-ordinator, for all his good work.

A launch of the selected poems will be held April 26, at McNally’s Grant Park location, beginning at 2 p.m.

— Ariel Gordon

David Jón Fuller

In the gap

On the icy shore of a glacier-scraped lake
fir and jack pine crowd poplar and birch,
roots grow no deeper than ancient rock allows,
enough to obscure this life’s thinness —
shallow soil accruing over centuries.

Beneath it, stone strata straddling
multiple extinctions, outlasting them,
which bore an Ice Age weight so heavy
the old stone is still rebounding, even
though all that’s left of the ice are lakes.

The Norse once thought:
before people, or gods, there was ice.
Frosty giants and an unformed earth,
a middle-ground for those who would come later.
But a spark was needed from a world of flame.

Now, in a still-cool springtime,
we have worked such wicked wonders
the world changes again. Those giants of ice
long-gone — while a hotter world breeds
blackened forests. Rains are scant, lake
levels lower. After the fires,
some may remain to remember,
but far too much will burn.

David Jón Fuller is a Winnipeg writer and editor. His debut novel, Venue 13, is forthcoming from Turnstone Press in May 2026. Find him online at www.davidjonfuller.com.

Alexander Wiebe

Sitting on a Matlock Pier

Call me Ishmael, I read,
as the wind washed waves
grasp the spindly trunks
of the pier’s wooden legs.

My eyes walk on water,
firmly footed atop the swell,
searching for a sail to raise,
a jib to tighten, a vessel to tack.

Without warning, my spirit tumbles
from the pier into the waves;
it is I they now grasp
and they pull me down,

down, like tackle in the reeds.
My body interred, my heart entombed.
My lungs fill and I am drowned —
I turn the page.

Alexander Wiebe was raised in Stonewall, Manitoba, and quickly found belonging in the outside world. His poetry seeks to acknowledge that camaraderie. He loves the sea.

Désirée Penner

My Grandma’s Living Room Closet Creaked

like a rickety dock, as I tugged three boat motors
from gummy depths. They choked up
brackish sweetness— long-stilled,
the scent of south-woods water and reed-rot.
Old gasoline tanged

metallic. Dust sparkled,
minnows caught in a sunbeam. Suddenly,
the afternoon tilted into August heat
and I’m clutching slippery little moons
from the silty belly of Pelican Lake—

because I cannot help myself, they plunk
into your lap with a soggy thump.
You yelp my full name, but I still ask
for clam chowder stew. I squint—
the lake is at my lashes.

Désirée Penner (she/her) is a queer poet, painter, and master’s student. She lives on a family farm and is an Al & Eurithe Purdy Residency Recipient for June 2026.

James Hargrove

Taproots

Had I not walked west along the beach in winter,
I would have missed it. On the north shore,
a snag of gnarled pine rising from the swash,
an osprey nest woven among dead branches,
and a taproot that once grew deep
until fresh surface water became brackish from the salt.

The towering pine had been a sapling
when sailing ships gave way to steam,
and pioneers sold out to sawyers;
A cat-faced scar and rusted nails
attest to the hacking and chipping for turpentine;
Broken clay pots, awash in the tide,
recall the time when healing started,
and bark grew over gutters, forming burls.

The still-living tree survived lightning fires,
pushing its taproot deeper, to draw up water
and brace against a century of storms;
But surging salt water closed in upon the tree,
sending salt fingers among its roots,
carrying off the overlying sands.

Had I not walked the beach that afternoon,
I would have missed it, a sentinel,
exposed by low winter tides,
mute testimony to a century of change,
foretelling higher tides to come.

James Hargrove is a retired biological scientist. His skaldic send-up, Gudrid Goes to Gimli, won the open poetry prize at the 2024 Icelandic Festival. Interests include bird migration, climate change, and converting poems to songs.

Janine Brown

Pot Hole Pie

The bridge swells

Unhealed wound

of a city no longer sealed

Racing across river lines

the cars carve deeper scars

Humans will never accept water as a boundary

That water has boundaries

Abandoned boats and boots

Potholes swallowing small dogs

You are learning how to walk and swim

in a world of passengers,

Flip to the passage about pilgrims

You have no idea how to carve a turkey,

you haven’t learned the perfect apology

“Made from what’s real”

An epitaph for a tourist attraction

Janine Brown (they/them) lives in the heart of downtown Winnipeg. Largely interested in poetry concerning alienation, the class war, and gender, they are very fun at parties.

proma tagore

reorient

proma tagore is a poet and teacher who lives on Treaty 1 Territory. as an immigrant, settler, and queer person of colour, she is committed to dismantling racism and colonization.

RYAN AD

EREBUS

They were all in love with dying
They were screaming to the sky
It whispered back, « 11 winters
for every hot July »

RYAN AD is an artist, cultural worker, curator and member of the African/Caribbean diaspora on Turtle Island. Work features in published literature, private and public collections across the Western Hemisphere.

Joanne Epp

Why wake except to this—

the young-again earth, lime-green luminous,
delirious with itself. Rest your feet on the sill,
window open to let in new verbs. Write them

on a fresh leaf. They all sound like the shape
of a bird’s wing. They are all synonyms
for surprise. Fling off the chill, come out

together, you and the sun. Leaves of wild rose,
elm, and lilac fan out their pleats, let sunlight
iron their folds—not yet a covert for birds,

still just a beaded curtain. Between its strands
the warblers flash their yellows, trill
from bush to bush. Catch them while you can,

these cloud-scattered mornings, bird-days
of migratory spring, catch them now
before the green darkens and heat settles in.

Catch them while they’re new, while you’re still
astonished, and the wing-rustle of a thrush
can still knock you over.

Joanne Epp is the author of two volumes of poetry, and also translates poetry together with Sally Ito and Sarah Klassen. She lives near the Assiniboine River in Winnipeg.

Chey Wright aka IDIC Verse

Lake Winnipeg Holds Council

At first light, the lake gathers its relatives.

Walleye speaks in silver—quick, careful—
A language that survives by staying just out of reach.

Whitefish carries the old stories, patient as winter
Ice, remembering every step laid upon it.

Sturgeon—ancient spine of the water—keeps to the deep;
When it rises, the shoreline stills.

The river mouths open wide—Red, Winnipeg—
Carrying silt, memory, and what could not stay upstream.

Then the others—uninvited, multiplying.

They do not learn the currents;
They cloud the shallows, disturb what is not theirs to name.

The lake shifts—not anger, but something older:
A remembering moving through gill, through root.

Sturgeon rises—not to fight, but to remain.

Because this is what the water knows:
Invasion is loud.

Survival is depth, patience,
The quiet refusal to disappear.

The songs of our relatives continue.

Chey Wright aka IDIC Verse is a Two-Spirit, autistic Métis poet with roots in Keeseekoowenin, living in Treaty 1 Territory, writing on Indigenous survival, blending storytelling and lyrical precision to explore belonging.

Jess Woolford

water of life

murk deep she stirred stretched
then set out, strokes seismic
womb wracking

nearly stranded at os narrows
she forced passage
setting bone ablaze and bending it to her will
until out of inmost ocean at last emerged
silk scaled selkie
slick with mother blood and broken water
squalling for sip so my milk tide surged
to meet her needful lips

cradled in grandmother’s crone hands
suckling sprite surrendered
to first bath’s warm grasp
and sighing, steeped in dreamings deep

when Agassiz intoned the true name
scrimshawed on baby’s bones
she arose and skimmered where ancient water yet puddles prairie
___________________wetlands rich in reeds and redwings
___________________vernal pools fecund with fevering frogs
_________then splashed straight into seep and snowmelt
_________and christened herself kin to this fen and these folk
_____________________celebrants of sweet living water

Jess Woolford’s poetry has appeared in The Mountain Troubadour, Young Ravens Literary Review, the museum of americana, Book of Matches, Text Power Telling, The Ecological Citizen, Prairie Fire and CV2.

Jody Baltessen

Core Sample

isotope / meander

geologists read rock as time
trace fossilized scripts of matted algae
clusters of claw shell scale bone, pyritized organic fern
toward a beginning

______________where global positioning was a shifting state (as in
the particular condition of something, not nation not territory not civic

not definitive)

eon era epoch age

______________I press my ear
into black pillow basalt – thrum – deep-seated deposits
fracture, flow, vein (as in
blood

as in pulse

as in beating heart)

mine – a claim bedded and layered
settling into place, an intricate isotopic signature (as in
a distinctive form

as in identity)

Jody Baltessen is an award-winning poet / writer / archivist. Her work can be found at On Creative Writing, The Goose, Prairie Fire, and elsewhere. She lives in Winnipeg (Treaty 1 Territory / Homeland of the Red River Metis).

Bertrand Nayet

étiage automnal

Bertrand Nayet est écrivain, comédien, peintre, éditeur, co-fondateur de l’Association des auteur·e·s du Manitoba français (AAMF)et du Regroupement des écrivain·e·s du Nord et de l’Ouest canadiens (RENOC), animateur du Kukaï Rouge et du cercle d’écriture Coulée d’encre.

Bertrand Nayet is a writer, actor, painter, editor, co-founder of the Association des auteur·e·s du Manitoba français (AAMF) and of Le Regroupement des écrivain·e·s du Nord et de l’Ouest canadiens (RENOC), leader of Kukaï Rouge and of the writing circle Coulée d’encre.