Asbjørn Stenmark : Six poems : translated from Norwegian by the author

 

 

 

The symbiosis

Krill lies in bed screaming for his teddy bear. It doesn’t matter if it’s the blue teddy or the brown one, because Krill doesn’t have a teddy bear, and that is why Krill is crying. (Imaginary teddy bears are the ones you miss the most.) Soon Grandma comes to comfort him. Not much of an effort. She stands in the doorway, takes off one of her shoes and throws it at the wall above his bed, so Krill gets to cuddle with that instead. Krill swallows his disappointment, chews on the heel and gnaws away at the hard footwear of reality as he listens to Grandma walking around the living room with only one shoe. The heavy thud each time she puts her right foot down makes him bite a little harder into his cuddly shoe. It is Grandma’s shoe, but it is also Krill’s shoe; it unites them, binds them together in this bitter symbiosis of crying, howling and painful splinters in the mouth.

 

Symbiosen

Krill ligger i senga og skriker etter bamsen sin. Det spiller ingen rolle om det er den blå eller den brune, for Krill har ingen bamse, og det er derfor Krill gråter. (Det er de imaginære bamsene som skaper det største savnet.) Snart kommer bestemor for å trøste. Det er ikke rare greiene. Hun står i døråpningen og tar av seg den ene skoen som hun kaster i veggen over senga, og så får Krill kose med den i stedet. Krill biter skuffelsen i seg, tygger på hælen og gnager på virkelighetens harde fottøy mens han hører bestemor gå rundt i stua med bare én sko. Det dumpe klasket hver gang hun setter ned høyrefoten, får ham til å bite enda litt hardere i koseskoen. Det er bestemors sko, men det er også Krills sko; den forener dem, binder dem sammen i en bitter symbiose av gråt, gauling og vonde fliser i munnen. 

 

Sunday Dinner

After Sunday dinner, Krill collapses in his room. He feels a burning in his stomach, a great fire raging inside and threatening to burn a hole right through him. Krill twists and writhes as his irritation only grows. Grandma has put poison in the stew again, and he knows he should have realized from the slightly overdone table setting and Grandma’s affected friendliness. It was nothing but small talk, laughter and polite phrases throughout dinner, along with a slightly more insistent note in her voice when she insisted he have a second helping of stew. Krill has stew stains on his shirt, tears in his eyes and wild tongues of flame in his bowels. Who can put out the stew fire? Not Grandma. She’s off playing bingo to celebrate. And not the neighbours, who have barricaded themselves inside their living rooms after finding Grandma’s last dinner guest in the potato field. Maybe the guardian angel at the foot of his bed? Krill looks up expectantly, but then he sees that the angel has been poisoned by the stew too.

 

Søndagsmiddag

Etter søndagsmiddagen kollapser Krill inne på rommet sitt. Han kjenner det svi i magen, en stor brann som raser rundt og truer med å brenne hull i ham. Krill vrir og bukter seg mens irritasjonen bare vokser. Bestemor har hatt gift i soddet igjen, og han vet at han burde ha skjønt det på den litt overdrevne borddekkingen og bestemors affekterte vennlighet. Det var bare småpludring, latter og høflighetsfraser gjennom hele middagen samt en litt mer bydende intensitet i stemmen da hun insisterte på å la soddet gå to ganger. Krill har soddrester på skjorta, tårer i øynene og ville ildtunger i tarmene. Hvem kan slukke soddflammene? Ikke bestemor, for hun har dratt på bingo for å feire. Og ikke naboene, som har barrikadert seg inne i stuene sine etter at de fant bestemors siste middagsgjest i potetåkeren. Kanskje engelen ved fotenden av senga? Krill kikker forventningsfullt opp, men så ser han at den er soddforgiftet, den også.   

 

Guardian Angel

The guardian angel watching over Krill is constantly checking the time and kicking impatiently at the gravel before flying around the corner of the house for a cigarette. The cigarette breaks grow longer and longer, expanding into weekend trips and weeklong vacations. Soon the guardian angel finds itself in a permanent state of being off guardian duty, mostly drifting aimlessly around town, slipping wearily between store signs and lampposts as its angel wings turn yellow and its angelic glow begins to fade. When Krill comes across it by the side of the road, the angel has turned completely brown and is lying curled up in the fetal position. Krill picks it up, takes the angel home and puts it in a shoebox on a bed of cotton wool and newspaper. Krill looks forward to feeding it marshmallows and raisins, singing sad songs to it and sharing quiet little conversations with it in the evenings, but then Krill finds a dead sparrow beneath his window and devotes all his attention to that instead. All the while, the guardian angel goes on lying there, keeping watch like a forgotten sock under the bed.

 

Engel

Engelen som våker over Krill, ser uavlatelig på klokka og sparker utålmodig i grusen før den flyr bak hushjørnet for å ta seg en røyk. Røykepausene blir stadig lengre, og utvides til helgeturer og ukelange ferier. Snart befinner engelen seg i en permanent våkefri tilstand, der den for det meste flakker formålsløst rundt i byen, smetter livstrøtt mellom butikkskilt og lyktestolper mens englevingene gulner og engleglansen blekner. Når Krill kommer over den i grøftekanten, har engelen blitt helt brun og ligger krøllet sammen i fosterstilling. Krill plukker den opp, tar engelen med seg hjem og legger den på ei seng av vatt og avispapir i ei skoeske. Krill ser frem til å mate den med marshmallows og rosiner, til å synge triste sanger for den og prate innforstått med den om kveldene, men så finner Krill en død spurv under vinduet sitt, og så setter han alt inn på den i stedet. Hele tiden mens engelen fortsetter å ligge der, våker videre som en gjenglemt sokk under senga.

 

 

The Note

Whenever Grandma thinks no one is watching, she carefully opens her handbag just a crack and takes out the note, an old yellow sheet of paper that looks as though it has spent years tucked away in her handbag. She studies the note for a long time, always with an expression unusually solemn for her. Krill has never seen this seriousness before. It only appears when Grandma opens her handbag, and Krill has hidden behind the curtains to spy on her. Her eyes suddenly become young and bright, and a blush spreads across her cheeks. Even her mouth grows more solemn as it moves while she reads, but always silently, without making a sound. Krill watches her mouth closely as she reads. One day he will learn to read lips, Grandma’s lips, something he can pick up if he just pays extremely close attention, Krill thinks, as Grandma’s mouth curls into a little smile, as if what she has read were a pleasant memory of a beautiful summer day long ago. At other times, her mouth tightens and her eyes grow sharp, almost flashing, and Krill thinks that whatever is written on the note must be of the utmost importance, something on which life itself depends. The note is Grandma’s secret, but it is Krill’s secret too. And the longer Krill watches Grandma staring at the note, the more he thinks this piece of paper has something to do with him. The note is about Krill. It is the only possibility that makes sense. Why else does she take it out the moment she thinks Krill has gone out the door? Why else would she look suspiciously from side to side before carefully opening her handbag and, with the nimbleness of a pickpocket, fishing out the yellow document? IT’S MY NOTE, Krill tells himself stubbornly. MY NOTE. KRILL’S NOTE. And if he says it enough times inside his head, he begins to feel that it is Krill himself being pulled out of Grandma’s handbag, faded and frayed around the edges, before being unfolded and all his secrets laid bare.

 

Lappen

Når bestemor tror at ingen ser henne, åpner hun forsiktig håndveska si på gløtt, og plukker frem lappen, et gammelt, gult papirark som gir inntrykk av å ha ligget i veska i lang, lang tid. Lappen studeres lenge og alltid med en til henne å være høytidelig mine. Krill har aldri sett dette alvoret før. Det er kun synlig når hun åpner veska, og Krill har gjemt seg bak gardinene for å spionere. Øynene hennes blir plutselig unge og blanke, og rødmen sprer seg i kinnene. Også munnen blir mer høytidsstemt der den beveger seg mens hun leser, men alltid stille, fullstendig lydløst. Krill følger oppmerksomt med på munnen hennes mens hun leser. En dag vil han lære seg å lese på leppene, på bestemors lepper, noe han kan plukke opp om han bare følger uhyre oppmerksomt med, tenker han, mens bestemormunnen kruser seg i et lite smil, som om det hun leste var et behagelig minne fra en deilig sommerdag for lenge siden. Andre ganger blir munnen strammere og øynene skarpe, nesten lynende, og Krill tenker at det som står på lappen må være av største viktighet, ja, noe livet avhenger av. Lappen er bestemors hemmelighet, men den er også Krills hemmelighet. Og jo mer Krill betrakter bestemor som stirrer på lappen, tenker han at dette papirarket har noe med ham å gjøre. Lappen handler om Krill, det er den eneste muligheten som gir mening. Hvorfor tar hun den ellers frem så snart hun tror Krill har gått ut døra? Hvorfor skulle hun ellers se seg mistenksomt om til begge sider før hun varsomt åpner håndveska si, og med en lommetyvs smidighet fisker frem det gule dokumentet? Det er lappen min, sier Krill innbitt til seg selv, min lapp, Krills lapp, og sier han det mange ganger nok inni seg, får han følelsen av at det er han selv som hentes frem fra bestemors håndveske, falmet i uttrykket og frynsete i kantene, før han brettes ut og alle hemmeligheter blottlegges.   

The Handbag

Krill often thinks he has no other goal in life than to open Grandma’s handbag and see what is written on the yellow note. It isn’t easy, because Grandma is at the other end of the handbag, and it is as if she knows what it means to Krill and, for that very reason, guards it as if her life depended on it. Wherever the handbag goes, Grandma keeps a firm grip on the handle. Wherever Grandma goes, the handbag goes with her. It clings under her arm when she goes out and lies under her pillow when she sleeps. Even when she passes out on the couch after a round of Yatzy, she always makes sure to roll over on top of the handbag before drifting off. Moving her without waking her is impossible. Wrenching the handbag away from her by force can’t be done. There are all sorts of things in it. Krill knows she keeps her rolling tobacco and hunting knife in there, along with various tools and a huge brick for delivering death threats. The brick helps make the handbag hurt like hell when it hits you in the back of the head. The handbag is a feared weapon. It is almost always closed, and on the rare occasions when it does open, it opens with a simple snap clasp. Few sounds set Krill’s nerves on edge like the click of the handbag opening. And nothing makes his heart sink like the handbag snapping shut again. Grandma’s handbag is made of black leather, but after years of use it has faded to a washed-out gray, and Krill thinks it looks like the skin of a tired elephant. With a mixture of dread and delight, he imagines what it might dredge up from its elephant memory if, for instance, it were to swap memories with Grandma’s shoe. Krill wouldn’t want to hear about all the jaws it had broken, the sudden blows to the back of the head and the teeth it had knocked out. Instead, he would make the handbag tell him about the yellow note – and preferably the story behind the little rodent head that once peeked out of it, excited and playful, with an inquisitive look all its own, as if it knew something about him, something urgent, fateful and of utmost importance.

 

Veska

Ofte tenker Krill at han ikke har andre mål i livet enn å åpne bestemors håndveske og se hva som står på den gule lappen. Det er ikke enkelt, for i enden av veska befinner bestemor seg, og det er som om hun vet hva den betyr for Krill, og nettopp derfor vokter hun håndveska som om det sto om livet. Overalt der veska er, tviholder bestemor på håndtaket. Hvor enn bestemor måtte befinne seg, har hun håndveska med seg. Den klistrer seg innunder armen hennes når hun går ut, og ligger under puta når hun sover i senga si. Selv når hun slukner i sofaen etter en runde Yatzy, passer hun alltid på å velte seg over håndveska før hun dupper av. Å flytte henne uten at hun våkner, er umulig. Å rive håndveska fra henne med makt, lar seg ikke gjøre. Innholdet er nokså diverse. Krill vet at hun oppbevarer rulletobakken og tollekniven der, i tillegg til ulike verktøy og en diger murstein til levering av trusselbrev. Steinen bidrar til å gjøre veska vond og jævlig når en får den i bakhodet. Veska er et fryktet våpen. Den er nesten alltid lukket, og når veska en sjelden gang åpner seg, skjer det ved hjelp av en enkel klikklås. Få lyder setter Krills nerver i spenn som når veska klikkes åpen. Og det er ingenting som får hjertet hans til å synke som når veska går igjen med et smell. Bestemors håndveske er i svart lær, men etter mange års bruk har den fått en utvasket grålig tone, og Krill synes den minner om huden til en sliten elefant. Med skrekkblandet fryd ser han for seg hva den kunne ha trukket frem fra elefanthukommelsen, om den for eksempel skulle ha utvekslet minner med bestemors sko. Krill ville ikke ha likt å høre om alle kjevene den hadde brukket, om plutselige bakhodeslag og utslåtte tenner. I stedet ville han ha fått veska til å fortelle om den gule lappen – og gjerne fått historien bak det vesle gnagerhodet som en gang tittet opp derfra, oppspilt og lekende, og med et eget granskende blikk, som om det visste noe om ham, noe presserende, skjebnesvangert og uhyre betydningsfullt.

 

Messenger 

Every now and then, the guardian angel crawls out from under the bed to stretch its legs and limber up. The stretching exercises also leave some room for self-examination. One is, after all, a heavenly being, not some dirty sock or a band T-shirt, it tells itself as it knocks out a couple of quick squats. Nothing less than a messenger from above, in fact, and then the angel has to remind itself that it has its duties here on earth. Even if it often forgets what they are. It is supposed to keep an eye on Krill, at least. That much it has gathered. There was also something about a yellow note and a warning, but the details have gotten a little fuzzy. Keeping an eye on Krill will have to do, it thinks, crawling back under the bed, ready to guard and protect him. And then there was something about the Grandma situation, the messenger remembers just before falling asleep.

 

Sendebud

Det hender at engelen kryper frem fra plassen under senga for å strekke på seg og tøye ut. Under uttøyingsøvelsene blir det også rom for selvransakelse. En er tross alt et himmelsk vesen og ikke en skitten sokk eller T-skjorte med bandmotiv, sier den til seg selv mens den kjører et par kjappe knebøyninger. Ikke noe mindre enn et sendebud fra oven, faktisk, og så må engelen minne seg selv på at den har sine oppgaver her på jorden den også. Selv om den ofte glemmer hva de går ut på. Den skal i alle fall holde oppsyn med Krill. Såpass har den fått med seg. Det var også noe om en gul lapp og en advarsel, men det har kokt litt bort i kålen. Å passe på Krill får holde, tenker den og kryper tilbake under senga igjen, klar for å vokte og beskytte. Og så var det noe med bestemor, husker sendebudet rett før det sovner.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Asbjørn Stenmark (b. 1971 in Brønnøysund, Norway) [photo credit: Leikny Havik Skjærset] is a Norwegian writer, translator and lyricist. He has published two collections of short prose and a collection of poetry. His translations include works by English- and German-language writers such as Matthew Sweeney, Jan Wagner and Franz Kafka. He has also written lyrics for a number of Norwegian bands. Stenmark lives in Stjørdal, Norway.

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.