Writes of Spring celebrates 10th anniversary with baker's dozen of poetry treats

Winnipeg Free Press

25-04-2025

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!
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Demeter-Anemone Willow (left) with their father, Andrew Vaisius, whose poem follows.
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.
Mike DealPhotojournalist
Mike Deal started freelancing for the Winnipeg Free Press in 1997. Three years later, he landed a part-time job as a night photo desk editor.
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