Manitoba poets, a world of poetry

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/04/2020 (1974 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

April is National Poetry Month but this year, it will probably go down in history as the month COVID-19 took hold, closing schools and non-essential workplaces, restaurants and bookstores.

This year is also the fifth anniversary of this specific poetry-month project and we’re happy to announce a new partnership with the Winnipeg International Writers Festival and with it, a new name: Writes of Spring.

You’ll find poems by 12 Manitoba poets working through the theme A World of Poetry.

You’ll also find portraits by Free Press photographer Mike Deal that are studio portraits, but outdoors. He spent a windy day setting up the white backdrop on tree-lined boulevards, in parking lots and driveways. All the poets had to do was run out of their houses, pose, and then return inside.

As we shelter-in-place, here’s hoping that these wide-ranging poems provoke and amuse, distract and fascinate.

— Ariel Gordon & Kerry Ryan

 

When Music Dies

by Bola Opaleke

Something rises. I like how the night before

fasten its scent around my breath
every morning. I was used to having shadows

of men hovering over me in the middle
of the night; scavenging the windy nightmares

of my old dreams. One lover calling on the other.

Using the megaphone in her eyes
as if the volume of his desire can be tune up or down.

She reaches for my lips & my body stiffened.
I grow up learning the dangerous language of hands.

Because some stories come out of the breasts running

like a river. I disagree with water directing
the affairs of men. In bathtubs. One lover calling

on the other using the wooden whistle.
He cannot tell why a dead dog wags its tail to the siren.

I like how the sky opens its eyes the way men open their tongues.

Bola Opaleke is an Nigerian-Canadian poet with work on CBC Books and in The Nottingham Review, The Literary Review of Canada, and Canadian Literature.

●●●

Newfoundland Fragments

by Julian Day

A long hike: your sandals break two hours in.
Careful with water, we work our way back.
We never make it to the end of Green Gardens and the open sea.

The next day, St. Anthony.
L’Anse aux Meadows a disappointment.
On the way we pass a single red house on a tiny island.

So much of what we do is hope and trying.
This dominion built on exploitation and extinction.
The killing of the Beothuk; their land New-found.

We drive and name each mile between crumbling towns.
Have I become the lacuna in my life?
At night, the stars sweep low and touch the ground.

Julian Day is a software developer. His debut chapbook will be published by Anstruther Press in 2021.

●●●

An excerpt from Three Solitudes

by Duncan Mercredi

This city
Sings a quiet song
Meeting at the junction of two rivers
Background song of drum and dance
Echoes of laughter and tears
Buried beneath the concrete
Sacred mounds long leveled
Meaning nothing
Needing space to build
Lay tracks
Displayed in glass cases
This city
Dirty sidewalks cover blood and death
A spirit left to lie alone
No name, no reason
Just a body, buried in back pages
A shrug, move on
I have lived here longer than where I was born
I walk along its concrete trails
Paths have led me through back alley dreams
Still my visions take me back
That place where the river blessed me
I could dive down deep within that clear cold water
Stretch my arms out to touch bottom
But I never could and over time
That clear cold water became cloudy
No longer clear
No longer life giving
No longer blessed
Now I haunt the urban landscape
Searching for another song
One I heard as a child
Has faded by city sounds and sirens in the night
Reaching the place where the city ends
All I see is an unending horizon
I always turn back
Face east, west, south but never north
I have left that place
I have placed my tobacco on these sidewalks
To claim this city as my home

Duncan Mercredi is a Cree/Métis writer and storytellter. He is the current Poet Laureate of Winnipeg. This poem will appear in his upcoming collection, mahikan ka-onot: The Poetry of Duncan Mercredi (Wilfrid Laurier University Press).

●●●

Winter, and the river

by Alison Calder

becomes a right-of-way,
skate-skiers’ herringbone
carving the waterway’s spine.
Space and time combine
in new perspective: from down here
you can see that the houses of the rich
are crumbling, old cottonwoods
falling into the stream.
Still, we can’t get over there,
the river’s altered state
allowing only so much movement,
ice tented strangely,
encampment or occupation.
On our side, the river asserts itself,
bubbling up under the bank, dry grass
icicled inside the drip drip drip
of warmer times.
Spring is coming, people say.
Right now, the snow’s still falling,
hiding footprints, voices, thin ice,
shielding a sun that’s slowly getting stronger.

Alison Calder teaches Canadian literature and creative writing at the University of Manitoba. Her most recent book is Connectomics.

●●●

Printanier

par Lise Gaboury-Diallo

rythmes de passage
chaque souffle chaque bougie
dans cette vie constellée
de rites initiatiques
on avance
toi et moi
suivant l’appât du hasard
la rime cajolée à l’âme
d’une raison ou saison
à l’autre on l’écrit
et on la lit
notre vie
notre espoir calibré

toujours recentré sur demain

Professeure au département d’études françaises, de langues et de littératures à l’Université de Saint-Boniface, Lise Gaboury-Diallo a publié huit recueils de poésie et deux recueils de nouvelles.

●●●

Untitled

by Ruby Chijioke-Nwauche

Tell me what you miss most about home
is it looking into a bright blue sky
through crisscrossing black electrical wires
watching the sun set
sky turning pink like the corrugated roofs of houses around you for miles
driving through bumpy cement streets
with radios blasting
5 songs blending into one
road trips to the village
accompanied by brief stops for
garden eggs and groundnuts
to keep your belly warm till
the pot of egusi waiting at your destination
Is it crossing gutters to the
spicy suya stand that you can smell from streets away
is it closing your eyes to feel the cool harmattan breeze against your skin
or window watching through the heavy rains of July
is it this feeling of the ground and soil under your feet
is it this fast rhythm of your heart that never stops
a feeling that burrows into you
that calls you back to where you came from
grabbing hold, not letting go.

Ruby Chijioke-Nwauche is a 21-year-old English major at the U of M originally from Nigeria.

●●●

The Hôtel Universel

by Joel Robert Ferguson

A ziggurat of all that’s best for only the best, the guests
are dry and well-fed. The wedding on the mezzanine level

is one to remember for all in attendance, but the halls above
are cold and silent. After the front desk formalities, no one’s asked

for their papers, and the beds are so large that nobody touches
if they don’t want to. The pizzeria the concierge suggests

gets so many orders wrong, sends every room extra anchovies
that perfume the halls with the sea and death, but a woman’s kind voice

will dispatch apologies and free pizzas with an accent
that can’t quite be placed. At the Hôtel Universel

no one feels transient, and not in an unsettling way either—
it’s just that none of the pens bearing the hotel’s logo have ink

so one’s thoughts keep escaping out into the drizzly night.
The wi-fi is a patchy too, but you can still stream

Frozen or The Shining, if you don’t mind the pauses to buffer
that extend and silence the closeup of Danny’s silent scream.

Joel Robert Ferguson divides his time between Winnipeg and Montreal, where he is finishing his Masters in English Literature at Concordia University.

The Hôtel Universel is from Ferguson’s debut collection, The Lost Cafeteria (2020, Signature Editions).

●●●

Untitled Tanka

by Debbie Strange

I have always
been a scatterling
in this world
of curiosities, there is
never enough time

Debbie Strange is a short-form poet whose work has been published in 15 countries and translated into 11 languages.

●●●

When One Cataclysm Melts Into Another

by Ron Romanowski

On Last Autumn’s Cruise I Saw a Norwegian Glacier Scream

The first wail had been of the glacier’s sickness
how it swooned under pressure, and
without pleasure
it became the astringent of its own demise
rotting from within itself,
done with itself,
never to desire again
that swell of a continental mount—
the sickness pissing by,
the romance flushed
as a Shakespeare with no lovers on stage—

And Last Night I Dreamt I Heard an American Mountain Sob

This second lamentation
could only be a mountain’s
illness
how it crumbled under oppression
and weighted misery
through the enigma of
its own allure,
gritted from within itself,
ministering to itself,
ever to require the spreading
of a continental shelf—
that thickness gone by, those eons flaccid,
Walt Whitman shorn of another multitude.

Ron Romanowski’s latest poetry collection is If 30,000 Strikers Marched Today (2019).

●●●

The Genocide Project

by Megan Wray

i was born with explosives for bones and a timer counting down in my chest
i was born in manhattan, 1939
laying Roses on flowers with Truth in my veins
and many folded cranes in the palms of the pained.
i was passed down Pearls
as they float under ships and hips in sea water Harbours
with last boat calls for the fishers and loggers
then the gates closed to protect those who lay too close to the water.
fear not, we shall not let them be captured by sea monsters
that wash up on our shores post-tsunami storms.
take what you can carry or what you will bury
and i will try to close the gap from east across west
and all of the rest i will carry in my bones.
on my back, the pigment still burns.
redress our wounds after aliens intrude
and two billion dollars collide with forces of nature.
we are scorched alive and they call it a success.
i was born an enemy to the state from which i get my face
and the land on which i lay.
and i have felt the melting of my skin as my red and white fly.
the sky above looms with fear
so i will hold the ash in my bones
i will always hold ash in my bones.

Megan Wray is a bisexual and biracial woman of colour who writes poetry to explore the intersections of her identity.

●●●

Names of Grasses

by Misuzu Kaneko, translated by Sally Ito and Michiko Tsuboi

The names of grasses people know
I don’t know at all.

The names of grasses unknown by people
I know those

because I gave them names –
names I liked to grasses I liked.

After all, the names of grasses people know
have already been given to them by someone else.

Only the sun in the sky knows the grass’ true names.

And so I call out to them
Only I call out to them.

Misuzu Kaneko (1903-1930) was a Japanese children’s poet who lived and worked in Yamaguchi prefecture.

Michiko Tsuboi is co-translator of Japanese poetry with her niece, Winnipeg poet Sally Ito. Michiko lives in Shiga prefecture.

●●●

Lift

by Jennifer Still

consider the 4000-year-old feather

slipped from an ice patch

the deep past offered up

while you sleep

in your child weight

as I carry your wedding dress

home from the cleaners

folded over my arm

brighter than snow

your pointed sleevelet

releasing

a tissue

Jennifer Still is a Winnipeg poet working at the intersection of language and material forms. She is the author of three poetry collections.