Arvida Juni Svenske is a poet, a folk high-school teacher, writer and journalist born in a place called Stockholm, Sweden. She is a history buff, fantasy nerd and a huge fan of hiphop and reggae, who in 2025 just published her first poetry collection in English, Caribbean Wind, Polynesian Storm published by She Rises , in which she explores colonial crimes committed and knowledge lost, especially other views on gender than the two-gender-norm. Oh, and she’s currently writing a follow-up book that details her journey into womanhood, Estrogen speech – and oh, she has a podcast: Cohenpodden.
Watch the video on ice monitoring and the ice boom
Clip your vest before you touch the line.
Then look where your boots are.
A cable under strain moves faster than you.
If it jumps, I can’t pull you clear.
The report calls this Phase Three.
We call it taking the strings off the breakwall,
towing them out from Buffalo,
making the mouth of Erie ready for winter.
Most pontoons: thirty feet of sealed steel,
thirty inches through, black and blunt.
Nothing graceful about it.
In a west wind, don’t waste motion.
Raise the junction plate. Fasten the buoy barrel.
Water comes over the barge while you line up the three-inch pin.
Watch the tug, not the gulls.
When I say easy, ease.
Never stand inside the bight.
At the intake crib, thirty feet under, they read the lake.
We start at thirty-nine degrees,
or on December sixteenth if the lake stays warmer.
High wind and waves can still stop us.
You asked where Canada starts.
At the chart table I’ll show you after shift.
Here, the anchor cables are numbered,
the spans lettered A through V.
The power companies divide the invoice exactly.
The weather does not.
Don’t call it a dam.
Water goes under from the first day to the last.
The steel gives loose ice a place to gather,
to freeze into its own arch
instead of running down the Niagara
toward shoreline docks and the power intakes.
In a hard winter, a west wind can stack ice twelve feet.
The boom may sink. It is made for that.
Ice rides over. Pressure passes. The pontoons rise.
Write overtopped.
Engineering will ask whether it failed.
You think I repeat myself. I do.
My first year I stepped inside the bight.
Frank swore once, pulled me back by the collar,
then went on fastening shackles.
I don’t remember what he called me.
I remember both my hands.
At night a camera watches what we built.
Most winters nobody phones. That is a good winter.
Turbines keep turning. Shoreline docks stay put.
Twenty-two miles downstream, near the Falls,
less ice reaches the power intakes.
By spring we count what remains on eastern Erie,
wait for safe water, loosen the buoy barrels,
tow every scarred string up the Buffalo River
and pull it into dry storage.
At the last span I tell you, “Pull the pin.”
You look at your boots first.
Good.
Span A swings free, blunt nose toward the Niagara.
The current takes the slack.
You give it room.
Source: Jatin Garg, 2026.
This poem won an Honourable Mention in the Niagara Falls Poetry Project 25th Anniversary Poetry Competition. It will be published with all the other entrants in a print anthology to be published by Phylum Press. To reserve a copy of the anthology please email aporteus@niagarapoetry.ca. A companion volume exploring the poetry over 6 centuries will also soon be available, and may be reserved ahead of time.
Jatin Garg is a fiction writer and poet from India whose work explores relationships, identity, memory, and the quiet pressures of everyday life. Drawn to people, places, and the ways history lingers, he combines close observation with imagination to find something unfamiliar inside ordinary experience.
Niagara Gorge From the Canadian Side Photo by Andrew Porteus, October 17, 2021
There was nowhere else for her to go. She looked to the depths, fighting vertigo. When she jumped, she took all her hopes and fears. Her bones weren’t discovered for many long years.
Source: T.W. Kriner, 2025. First published in T.W. Kriner. The Red Pill and Other Poems. Buffalo: J & J Publishing, 2026.
This one is loosely based on the death of my friend’s child.
T. W. Kriner is the author of Journeys to the Brink of Doom (1997), In the Mad Water (1999), Twelve Dozen Four-by-Fours (2025), and The Call of Tawiskaro (2025). He lives in a Western New York swamp with his wife and two cats.
Kriner says:
About three years ago I began writing what I call four-by-four poems: four lines with four beats per line, usually with a pair of rhyming couplets. The challenge for me was to do at least one or more of the following in each poem: tell a story; paint a picture; evoke or share a memory; express a political opinion; convey my view on a particular subject; do something else while trying to get a laugh. I’ve recently posted a fair number of them at All Poetry .com, if you’d care to sample.
Fisherman on Rock in Niagara River Just Above the Falls. Photo by Andrew Porteus, March 27, 2003
While trying to rescue his tackle box, he tripped into the current from his perch on the rocks. He floundered then foundered and, just like a stone, he went to the bottom. He died there alone.
Source: The author, 2025. First published in T.W. Kriner. The Red Pill and Other Poems. Buffalo: J & J Publishing, 2026.
T. W. Kriner is the author of Journeys to the Brink of Doom (1997), In the Mad Water (1999), Twelve Dozen Four-by-Fours (2025), and The Call of Tawiskaro (2025). He lives in a Western New York swamp with his wife and two cats.
The Late Fisherman in the Niagara Gorge is loosely based on an incident witnessed by Kriner’s son’s father-in-law.
Kriner says:
About three years ago I began writing what I call four-by-four poems: four lines with four beats per line, usually with a pair of rhyming couplets. The challenge for me was to do at least one or more of the following in each poem: tell a story; paint a picture; evoke or share a memory; express a political opinion; convey my view on a particular subject; do something else while trying to get a laugh. I’ve recently posted a fair number of them at All Poetry .com, if you’d care to sample.
Unknown group having a picnic in Queen Victoria Park, Niagara Falls, July, 1927 From the Niagara Parks Commission Collection, Niagara Falls Public Library
Forceful rush of water, loud
flowing toward the precipice,
I stood alongside the grassy edge
of the Niagara River, shoes kicked off,
toes independently investigating
blades of grass and dandelions.
Standing away from a blanket
spread with our wicker picnic
basket, cloth napkins and cooler,
my mother’s eyes were shadowed
behind dark glasses, but I knew
they were on me and the wild
river behind, the smell of
a steel plant, an acrid invasion
to mingle odors with moisture filled air.
So close to the water, she shook her head
when I begged to wade, not knowing
the demon force would sweep
a child away like so many memories.
We picnicked with a game
of brightly colored rings, tossed
to my father and to my brother
who leapt up to catch the red one.
My mother sedentary in contrast to
the activity of family games
beside the raging river.
Julie A. Dickson
Niagara River 1965 written 2018, previously unpublished.
Julie A. Dickson is originally from Buffalo, NY. Her father’s family was from Guelph and Vineland Station, Ontario, Canada in the late 1800’s, they founded the Culverhouse Canning Factory there. Dickson lived near Lake Erie and Niagara Falls until her early teens, when her family relocated to Massachusetts. Always the lakes-girls, her poems often reflect in memories of Lakes Ontario and Erie, and visiting the falls. Her poems appears in many journals including Ekphrastic Review, Misfit, Open Door and others; full length works on Amazon. Dickson has been a guest editor, past poetry board member, is an advocate for captive elephants and shares her home with two rescued cats.
Julie A. Dickson was the guest editor of the Ekphrastic Review challenge to write a poem inspired by Frederic Edwin Church’s painting Niagara, 1857. See a page about ekphrastic poetry, including the poems from the Ekphrastic Review
