WINNER: Backyard Fence

His backyard pine fence is all that will survive of my father. He rebuilt it twice, the first with wooden scraps from the alley behind their house, so trained to use what’s there than buy.

The poem “Backyard Fence” is urgent, musical, and embodied, and the language of the poem welcomes you in. Here is a poem that reflects deeply, with precision, and makes you feel. Here is a poem that knows how something small and ordinary can contain a whole world.

—Doyali Islam


His backyard pine fence is all that will survive
of my father. He rebuilt it twice,
the first with wooden scraps from the alley
behind their house, so trained to use what’s there
than buy. The wood rotted quick.
He starts again during Saskatchewan’s hottest summer
with wood from Home Depot. He measures
with the same care he gave when I was in physio
after my spinal fusion relearning how to walk.
A pencil behind his ear, he saws the wood, no markings
visible any longer. Shirtless, his skin reddens
under the sun-moon, he forgets how his aged body needs
to slow, to stretch, but he keeps pushing. He knows nothing else.
The war teaches you the incapability of stopping.
The wooden fence is levelled. Keeps what bothers him in—
my sister’s aimed anger, the sparrows’ chirp & how they remind him
he’s alive—He doesn’t stain the wood this year.
Instead, he sits and stares at his work, what his two hands can make.

About the author

Tea Gerbeza (she/her) is a queer, disabled, and neurodivergent poet and multimedia artist. Most recently, her scanograph, “My Father Catches Me Confronting Memory,” won an Honourable Mention in Room Magazine’s 2020 Cover Art Contest, and she was a finalist for Palette Poetry’s 2021 Emerging Poet Prize. Tea’s new work appears or is forthcoming in the anthologies Nothing Without Us Too (Renaissance Press) and Framed & Familiar: 101 Portraits: An International Anthology of Poetry and Photography (SandCrab Press/Wet Ink Books), the Literary Review of Canada, Contemporary Verse 2, and untethered magazine. Tea is a 2022 Zoeglossia Fellow. She resides in the Canadian prairies with her spouse and three corgis.