
WINNER: Backyard Fence
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.