National Poetry Month : Stephanie Bolster,

 

HASTINGS PARK (BC, Exhibition Grounds)

By boat by train by bus citizens came or parked
by the Chute the Chute handed over the keys.

Women in the cattle barns men where used to be horses
and stands from which to watch.

The stink the twitches in the straw
stuffed into sheets to make mattresses.

Sheets hung to turn the stalls to rooms.
They were not. The food was slop.

They starved or sickened and shat.
No food if you arrived at night.

When I went there as a kid to see prize chicks
amidst the stink no one told me this.

 

 

 

 

Stephanie Bolster has published four books of poetry, most recently A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth; excerpts from her current manuscript, Long Exposure, were finalists for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2019. Her first book, White Stone: The Alice Poems, won the Governor General’s and the Gerald Lampert Awards in 1998. Born in Vancouver, she teaches creative writing at Concordia University in Montréal.