Coffee Culture – corner of Queen St. & Erie Ave., Niagara Falls, 2015. Photo by Alannah Mason. Courtesy of Niagara Falls Public Library
Sunday afternoons consisted of pressing five year old flesh against puzzle pieces, constructing a cardboard genome. Stuck in monosyllabic monotony to keep childhood ignorance distilled from ambiguity.
On Tuesdays, teen intimacies grew in the form of Queen Street coffee shops, hoisting shy ankles curled during untimely dates. Couples waited for conversations to climax, leaving sweat on lips to taste like warm milk.
Forget embarrassment and after parties where cold hands sunk into heads, pulling hair back behind the ears so stuttering saliva could cascade freely into Chippawa porta-potties. The guiltless eloquence of touch leaves a sensual lore sliding with voluptuous syncopation.
Ryan Racine earned his master’s of English language and literature from Brock University. He is currently working as a high school teacher and college instructor in Ontario. His poetry can be found in The Steel Chisel, Pauses/Words/Noises, The Brock University Anthology, Pictures & Portraits, Ekphrastic, Joypuke, Weekly Poems, and PACE Magazine.
See other poems by Ryan Racine on the Niagara Falls Poetry Project website: • Flow State • Worldly Wounds
Niagara Parks Commission Butterfly Conservatory – Interior View – Statue Of Boy & Dog, 1997. Photo by Reg Deacon. Courtesy of Niagara Falls Public Library
My dog is a narrative archivist, unearthing the forgotten and polluted histories that are scattered across Niagara Falls’ ecosystem.
Like the bacterial intrusions that make their way into his body and cause biological mutations, the city’s traumas enter and impregnate my mind.
Realizing that i do not have the ability to recreate a preinfectious state, i instead reflect on what it means to be in a postinfection state where i see myself
as part of the problem. All i have is my dog’s nose, the bringer of light that grants recognition to the unsaid.
Ryan Racine earned his master’s of English language and literature from Brock University. He is currently working as a high school teacher and college instructor in Ontario. His poetry can be found in The Steel Chisel, Pauses/Words/Noises, The Brock University Anthology, Pictures & Portraits, Ekphrastic, Joypuke, Weekly Poems, and PACE Magazine.
See other poems by Ryan Racine on the Niagara Falls Poetry Project website: • Flow State • Sorting Skins
The Europa Hotel in Downtown Niagara Falls. Photo by Cole McInerney
And the street held silence for two strangers who didn’t have to stay that way. We stood silent below lamplight in the magnetic time.
Your suburban home stood parched in the dark and didn’t know me well. Your mother stood at the northern window and pretended to be passing by. The ten o’clock fireworks stood above the hotels and were heard in a tired sky. Your roof stood parallel to that forgiving horizon.
Your car stood locking and unlocking as we collided. We stood silent across from fire station number three then went around your block again. And in that silence we don’t celebrate the ending we just end up walking other ways.
Source: The author, 2021
Russell Street was first published in The Continuist, May 10, 2020
Cole McInerney is a poet from Niagara Falls, Ontario. He studied English at Toronto Metropolitan University. Currently, he is a MFA student at the University of South Carolina, studying poetry. His poems have been published in several print and online publications, including Feral Poetry, White Wall Review, The Bookends Review, and Echolocation Magazine.
Fallsview Boulevard in centre of photo, running from top to bottom. This is at the bottom of the hill. Imax Theatre on right, Best Western large rectangular building on left. Niagara Falls is to the right of this photo. August 22, 2005. Photo by Alina Rashid. Image courtesy of Niagara Falls Public Library
My grandmother at forty woke up before dawn
to dress, put on make-up, and curl her hair.
She was divorced, a mother of five, and a waitress
at the Best Western hotel in Niagara Falls.
The job started at eight o’clock but, always,
she left her apartment on Main Street early. Turned
the key in the lock. The click in the lock
told her she had the freedom to claim the open,
silent walk. She was a waitress at the Best
Western hotel in Niagara Falls. The boss was waiting
at the job, but the shift started at eight o’clock,
and just after dawn my grandmother still found worlds
of time. Worlds enough to breathe the air and know
she was alive. In 1980, in Niagara Falls,
the air smelled of water and smoke and big car
engines. Morning leavings of tourist bacchanals
performed all night before. But she didn’t care
for any of that. She was a waitress at the Best
Western hotel, and when she walked down
the Fallsview Boulevard hill she knew—she was alive.
These days my grandmother’s legs are frail
as the stilts of dying birds, but four decades back
they were still strong enough to work all day—
work and wake again before the dawn, wake
to descend the last stretch of hill. Watch
the rising sun turn Niagara’s jagged trench
and torrent liquid gold. Now at eighty years,
my grandmother trains my gaze with misty eyes
and lifts a brittle claw. When I was forty,
she confides, I was a waitress at the Best Western
hotel. Every morning before work, I’d walk down
to Niagara Falls. Watched the water. Knew
I was alive. A smile snakes across her skull. You know,
I thought I was so old. My God, she whispers,
I’d give anything now to be forty. Walk
down the hill to the water. Alive.
Source: FJ Doucet, 2021
FJ Doucet’s work has been published in grey borders magazine, The Banister, Hamilton Arts and Letters, Red Bird Chapbook website, Ascent Aspirations, and The Lyric. She is the newest president of the Brooklin Poetry Society. Doucet was born and mostly raised in Niagara Falls, Ontario, and though she has since lived on three continents, Niagara continues to haunt her.
