Process Note #79 : T.S. Leonard

The 'process note’ pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note and poems by T.S. Leonard are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and poetry classes at the University of San Francisco, Dominican University, and Saint Mary’s College of California. Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

The moment, if you could pinpoint it, when my collection of poems started to cohere into Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival, announced itself with a flamboyant boom: a Time Traveler crashed into a gay bar. I was maybe 20-poems-deep into composing what I thought was a book when this queer character arrived and threw a storm door open onto a technicolor world. There, time and tense meld and dance; form blooms and blurs. As I followed this recurring speaker, the Time Traveler, across their shifts, I found a freer, and more fun, machine with which to explore what I’d set out to explore: grief; celebration; community care; a lineage of LGBTQ+ resilience; our noisy past, our fragile future, and our dire present. The Time Traveler finds and loses friends. They try drag and dance at the disco. They fight and fall in love. In shadowing their twirling across time, I began to find a sense of diction and direction for the poems that would become this collection, Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival.

In Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival, camp—Susan Sontag’s sensibility defined as being “alive to a double sense in which some things can be taken”—functions as a poetic device. One avatar for the Time Traveler is Dorothy, as in The Wizard of Oz. That American myth, especially as retold in the 1939 film version, has sustained a particular resonance for queer people, and in particular gay men, for its tale of leaving home for the glittering city, for its themes of strength in chosen family, and for its relationship to longing and tragedy embodied in the life of its star, Judy Garland. The film’s use of technicolor as technique to literalize the divide between Kansas and Oz—the former grimly beige, the latter a vibrant fantasia—speaks to a queer burgeoning desire for escape from constraints and belief in a far-off place to which one might better belong. Throughout the collection, the rainbow, too, recurs as a kind of border, a partition between the speaker’s Midwest home and their queer urban community. But it is also a temporal marker—another impermanent beauty; the sense of hope after a storm.

For Dorothy, as for many queer people, home was never exactly or entirely a physical space: home is another horizon line, a remembered warmth or a yearning for completion. Throughout the collection’s third section, the speaker and their friends dance through pandemics, forge community from bathhouses to rented apartments, and strive for preservation. “What do you call nostalgia for a time that hasn’t yet passed?” one interlude asks. “Hope?” In the 1933 film Queen Christina, we watch Greta Garbo, a young royal who has fled her castle (and a war) in disguise as a common man, soak in the experience of being free from palatial expectations for the first time. In an otherwise unremarkable suite in the village inn, Garbo as Christina wanders around spectrally, lightly touching each cabinet corner, embracing the bedposts: "I've been memorizing this room,” she coos. “In the future, in my memory, I shall live a great deal in this room."

As the Time Traveler continues to tug at threads of art and music from the late 20^th Century, the tapestry begins to unravel: in the fourth section of the collection, time collapses into a space (stage) of queer inheritance. Let’s call it the Archive. In Suite: A Fraternal Order of Glitter and Ash, the four movements jump from the Trojan War to the 1979 White Night Riots in San Francisco to the AIDS-devastated early-90s before arriving in a high school cafeteria in the new millennium. In each era, there is the threat of violence and there is the thrill of community. By combining these four pieces into a suite—a musical set favored by both the Baroque and the disco labels—there is a new continuity traced along cultural lines, a sense of necessary history that is largely left out of textbooks. The section closes with the collection’s second and final ekphrastic poem, “Healing the World from Little Island,” a response to poet Tim Dlugos. Like González-Torres, Dlugos contracted and fought and worked through an AIDS diagnosis—his later work marked by a haunting, poignant urgency, fists pounding at the thin veil of life. It is in this poem that the partition between the Time Traveler and the poet most potently blurs, the voice emerging as guttural cry from atop a fresh pile of rubble (not unlike the 1960 Life magazine photograph of Gloria Swanson, begowned, posing amidst the rubble of New York’s Roxy Theater, which would inspire Stephen Sondheim’s time-traveling 1971 musical, Follies). The language is a deluge, an unrelenting parade of images from Manhattan’s last century spanning at least two pandemics, Pride and terror, movements and monuments. It is the sound of the Archive splitting open, its histories spilling out and covering our present in fabulous pasts.

Where do we go after it all breaks apart? We burrow deeper into love. In the collection’s penultimate section, the Time Traveler earns a more intimate perspective on what it means to connect. “The Time Traveler Finally Falls in Love” is a love poem heavy with an awareness that everything good must end, but still reveling in goodness. In “Heirloom” the tight tercets squeeze together images of domesticity—gardens and dinners; books and friends—in a distinctly queer household. The speaker’s lover builds them a medicine cabinet door. These are the lessons of queer lineage put into practice, a redefinition of home-making as act of radical love. In that spirit of innovation, perhaps the collection’s most formally inventive piece comes in “Saturn Street Steps,” in which brackets and forward slashes are used to create three distinct layers of time on the page. It’s a simple scene: two lovers sit on a park bench, the top of San Francisco’s slightly hidden Saturn Street, taking in the panoramic view. The present moment is interrupted, first by a forward slash to denote simple past (“the spot where we sit/sat”), and next by brackets to contain a future past: the bench “looks out all across [ what used to be ] Eureka Valley.” At what is effectively the volta, it all collapses into a single second:

you take/took
                     my hand in your fist
          and tell/told
me how long it would last—
          the memory of the feeling of being
so briefly, perfectly alive:          for all time.

The Time Traveler, inevitably, finds in every moment a door. How will all this get remembered? Who will sing our songs? In the final section of the collection, these inquiries are literalized in the form of an imagined interview. “Anderson Cooper Interviews the Time Traveler” is, on its face, a playful exercise in formal disruption. The Time Traveler is questioned in the style of a magazine interview, giving the speaker a chance to riff on the preceding themes of disco and lineage. That the interviewer is Anderson Cooper, even, may be taken as a joke, but Cooper’s own public persona as a gay man conjures some of the significant shifts which have transpired in the early 21^st Century. Cooper’s trajectory follows an arc of acceptability politics: he comes out publicly in the post-AIDS era of the Human Rights Campaign and the fight for gay marriage, before ultimately “starting a family” by raising his children—in a decade where conservative panic around queer visibility in schools is back on the rise. With every step forward there is progress gained, but there is loss, too. We don’t know where the next turn of this trajectory will take us, but we can imagine.

Saturn Street Steps 

The spot where we sit/sat and you hold
          /held me      /let me go
looks out all across [ what used to be ]
         Eureka Valley: little diamond tips,
the pastel Victorians                    /sand dunes /glass
         skyscrapers. We must [ have ]
                     look [ ed ] so tiny when
                               you take/took
                     my hand in your fist
          and tell/told
me how long it would last—
          the memory of the feeling of being
so briefly, perfectly alive:   for all time.
          and I laugh [ ed ],    nervously or
because I know/knew even         now/then
          how right you are/were. We kiss
                     [ ed ]  /release        
                                and under us the city
                     comes/came back
          to life. For a moment, it is/was called
San Francisco
          but this hill was here before us
and it is/will be here [ still ] long after
          we leave.                 /we are gone.
                               /we return.

 

(originally appeared in Post Road, issue 41)

 

 

 

T.S. Leonard [photo credit: Wayne Bund] is a poet, performer, and educator whose work has been featured in Poetry, Foglifter, and Fourteen Poems and in collaborative projects at the Portland Art Museum and Pacific Design Center. Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival, winner of the 2024-2025 Poetic Justice Institute Prize, is his debut collection. Originally from Kansas City, Missouri, he lives and teaches in San Francisco.

Links:  Website | Instagram | Substack 

 

 

  

Maw Shein Win’s most recent full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn) which was shortlisted for the 2025 Northern California Book Award in Poetry. Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) was longlisted for the PEN America 2021 Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA, the recipient of the 2026 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature, 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 2025 Nomadic/SF Foundation Literary Award for Non-fiction. She is a member of The Writers Grotto and a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse. She teaches poetry in the MFA Programs at the University of San Francisco, Dominican University, and Saint Mary’s College of California. mawsheinwin.com

Kim Fahner : A Mudlarker’s Diary, by Ariel Gordon

A Mudlarker’s Diary, Ariel Gordon
Pinhole Poetry, 2026

 

 

 

Anyone who follows Ariel Gordon on social media (IG @janedayreader) will know that one of her passions in life is mudlarking. If you aren’t sure of what it is, mudlarking is something that started in 18^th century London, along the River Thames. Contemporary mudlarkers go out to the edges of rivers and sift through mud to find what lies beneath. Bits of bottle glass, pieces of china cups and saucers, cast off buttons, and shards of ceramics. In London, you need a permit to go mudlarking and you are not permitted to re-sell your finds. For Gordon, Winnipeg’s Red and Assiniboine Rivers are the places she most often goes to search out the past, often with other mudlarking poet friends who share her passion.

The poems in Gordon’s newly released chapbook, A Mudlarker’s Diary, document her riverside adventures from June to October 2023 and mark the river level of each visit to a shoreline. In the first poem, dated June 1, Gordon writes of “slip-n-slide footsteps” as she and fellow poet-mudlarker, Sally Ito, “chase geese/from beach to beach, yellow goslings herded/between black & white//goose & gander.” They move past encampments of unhoused people while Gordon discovers “the biggest chunk//of poison bottle I’ve ever found,/its blue glass sides studded w/ hobnails/& embossed along//one edge: NOT TO BE TAKEN.” Later, further along the shore, the poet finds the remnants of a dead fawn, “its speckled hide attended by flies,/not mauled but somehow folded/wrong.” Returning later that same year, Gordon finds that the carcass has gone, dragged off by some hungry creature.

Throughout the poems in this collection, Gordon refers to river pollution, referencing “Floating condoms, yes, but also ducks/w/ gasoline heads” and speaks of how the river has become “full of effluent,” a place where Winnipeg garbage has been dumped for generations. Despite the brightly coloured plastic tampon applicators and broken chunks “of red bike reflector,” Gordon is hopeful in her work. She writes of the birds and insects that live along the rivers, from “Black & white winged//grasshoppers, butterfly mimics” that “fling themselves into the air” to “hungry gulls,” a “yearling//deer, its back still spotted,” and a bird that “called beautiful warnings//all summer.” The poet walks near to “mobs of geese/& ducks,” birds that ignore her because she ignores them, with her “eyes fixed on my feet.”

This mudlarker poet converts “settler garbage, smashed status/symbols, into finds,” searching out the history of “an embossed medicine bottle” that was found “under a rock: John W. Bennie,//Dispensing Chemist, Polmont Station” to later discover that the pharmacy where it originated “was at a train station between Glasgow/& Edinburgh & dates it//back to the early 1900s.” This information, sussed out on the internet, has the poet thinking about “someone/tucking it in their luggage, next/to their immigration papers…”

After journeying through Gordon’s A Mudlarker’s Diary, a reader finds herself thinking of how humans have always created refuse, just from having lived in various spots. From ancient midden heaps dug up by archaeologists to these more recent finds documented by Gordon along the riverbanks in Winnipeg, we are here for such a short time but leave behind clues to our existence.

What’s also present in A Mudlarker’s Diary is an awareness of how social class is reflected in the refuse left behind by humans in the rivers and shorelines, but also highlights Gordon’s views of the landscape as she moves by inhabited and abandoned encampments while seeing the wealthier houses in the distance. This is not simply a poetic documentary of what’s been found during a series of mudlarking outings, bur rather a witnessing of what has been—and what is now—and a call to action to pay attention to both the landscape of the natural world and the people who have inhabited it.

The cover of A Mudlarker’s Diary is appropriately mud-coloured and some of the finds mentioned in the poems are visible inside the chapbook as drawings. These illustrations are taken from Gordon’s photographs of her mudlarked discoveries, and the delicate rice paper flyleaf features embossed finds that she stamped with ink. This is, to be sure, another fine chapbook released by Pinhole Poetry’s brilliant publisher, Erin Bedford, who’s curating an important body of Canadian poetic work in both her online journal and in this poetry chapbook press. All of these gorgeous chapbooks can be purchased online via Pinhole Poetry’s website.

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her most recent books include The Pollination Field (Turnstone, 2025) and The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46, 2024). She is the Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (TWUC) and recently won first place for her CNF essay, "What You Carry," in The Ampersand Review's 2024 essay contest. Kim may be reached via her author website.

Tyler Mills : Three poems from her

 

 

 

 

Between 1837 and 1852, Catherine gave birth to ten children.

One died, at almost one.

The affair with the young actress began in 1857.

In 1858, Charles tried to institutionalize Catherine.

Her doctor refused.

 

 

 

Project

This is not a biography in poems.
Not a search for presence.
Not a re-enactment of a person:
more like a walk
through a meadow
where someone had built
a steel sculpture. You can pass
through its legs and perceive what
parts of trees, sky, September
clouds back-lit and molten
look like where you stand
and where you stood.

 

 

As If

While I read about her
wet nurse one afternoon, on my phone, 

of course (“bad mom”),
I thought I knew 

my child was on the swing
in front of me 

and I thought I lost
only moments, 

but when
I looked up the seat 

swung emptily and it
was as if 

I had no child.

 

 

A Mother in Dickens
          from Hard Times 

Pink-eyed bundle
of shawls 

tidies cabinets—
minerals and shells— 

like a feminine dormouse,
even the imagination 

of the novelist stretching
like a wet stocking 

to offer us this
analogy: Mrs. G., 

weakly smiling,
faintly looked at 

the tongs, which makes
sense as it was her 

job to tend the fire
and feed 

all those kids, I think,
but there is more he says 

of her, this omniscient
mind. The family man 

invites us to see her
wondering 

if the tool should be dug
under the jewels of 

broken tinder, furrowed
like a brain. 

That this is
the most appropriate thing 

her imbecility could think
of doing, the book says— 

no, not everyone
could stride in 

and demand tea
and round o’s and i’s, 

ink on paper like starlings
eating from a weedy field, 

like pottery smashed in dirt
heaps and buried 

while children ran around
coughing and shitting in pans, 

no, but she might have showed
a symptom 

of coming to life. If he let her.
She might speak.

 

 

 

 

Tyler Mills is the author of Big Bad, forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2028, City Scattered (Snowbound Award, Tupelo Press 2022), Hawk Parable (University of Akron Press 2019), and Tongue Lyre (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, Southern Illinois University Press 2013). Her chapbook her is forthcoming in November 2026 from above/ground press. She is co-author with Kendra DeColo of Low Budget Movie (Diode Editions). Her memoir The Bomb Cloud (Unbound Edition Press 2024) received a Literature Grant from the Café Royal Foundation NYC. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New Republic, and Poetry, and she has written a guidebook of poetry prompts for poets, Poetry Studio: Prompts for Poets. Tyler teaches for Sarah Lawrence College’s Writing Institute and lives in Brooklyn, on part of the unceded homeland of the Lenape people.

Sanna Wani : How does a poem begin?

How does a poem begin?

 

 

 

How does a poem begin?

For me, with a feeling. For others, it’s a form of thinking – or being – or some other verbiage. A kind of doing. I don’t know about doing, though, lately. I resist the poem’s doing and I’m more interested in it’s feeling. It’s radar for intimacy. I’ve always been like that, though. I want to be close to the world. I want to curl up inside its rind.

What makes a good poem?

Might as well ask what makes goodness. A good question, for sure, a complicated one too. I’m thinking now of ouroboros, the snake eating itself, when I think of goodness. It’s binary, I’ve resisted all my life. Over and over, we’re told or we’re telling each other to resist goodness, even as we strive for it. It’s an important question in my own work. Danez Smith recently had a great little PSA on Instagram about the importance of a bad poem, how we love to poem before it performs for us whatever deem to be a poem’s goodness – it’s craft – it’s culture – it’s empirical or enterprising ability.

Over and over again, I’ve returned to the idea that a good poem, for me, is a poem that changes me fundamentally. You’re a different person after you’re done reading it, or something in the world is different because of it. The poem that knows you’re going to die, I’ve heard attributed to Solmaz Sharif. The poem that knows how I want to live, I want to say back.

 

 

 

 

Sanna Wani [photo credit: Hamzah Amin] is a Kashmiri writer, editor, and translator based in Toronto. She is the author of My Grief, the Sun (House of Anansi Press, 2022) and Lantern (House of Anansi Press, 2026).