Congrats to Eleonore Shönmaier, winner of the 2019 Broadsheet Contest.

It Didn’t Happen Here
by Eleonore Schönmaier

i’m in the bus which is really just an old car
and it’s night and pouring rain and i’m
thirteen and the car is jammed with
bodies and we’re about to head
down the long dirt road out to
my settlement and the driver
shouts, don’t let the drunk
indian in, shouts to close
the door and i slam the
door shut and blood
runs down the
window and a man is out there alone in the
night with a smashed hand but we all
drive off into the dark and i slammed
the door shut on a man’s hand and
we drove off into the night
and you tell me how you
held a little girl’s hand
and you tell me how she was your first
indigenous friend and i’m not saying
it’s not true but if this was the only
truth we would not have the
stories we have
where the drunk man-next-door has a
smashed hand (and i too would have
a bottle in my pocket if i lived in
steady fear) blood running
down the window and there
is a man alone in the night
left to walk to the places
he needs to go when
walking is too far
for any man to
have to go
in all that
cold

Eleonore Schönmaier’s most recent poetry book is Dust Blown Side of the Journey from McGill-Queen’s University Press. Her other collections are the critically acclaimed Wavelengths of Your Song (2013) and Treading Fast Rivers (1999). Her poetry has won the Alfred G. Bailey Prize, the Earle Birney Prize, and is widely anthologized including publication in Best Canadian Poetry.

The juror for this year’s Broadsheet Contest was Nisha Patel. Thank you for your hard work Nisha!

Meet the Juror

Nisha Patel is an award-winning Indo-Canadian poet and artist. She is the Festival Producer of the Edmonton Poetry Festival, and a member of the Breath in Poetry Collective. In 2018, she was selected as a recipient of the 2018 Edmonton Artists’ Trust Fund. She is the 2016 Edmonton Indie Slam Champion, a finalist of the Canadian Individual Poetry Slam and a finalist of the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word. Her work has been published in a collection of poems called Water and a solo chapbook Limited Success through Glass Buffalo Publishing. She has performed across Canada and the world, sharing her work on multiple tours and international features. Her poetry speaks to themes of race, feminism, and identity, focusing strongly on her struggles and triumphs as a woman of colour. She has worked with youth poets, adults, and students through storytelling and poetry workshops as the Artist in Residence in The Nook Cafe, Artist in Residence at The Sewing Machine Factory, and in 2016 gave a TEDxUAlberta talk discussing the intersections between poetry and politics. She is also a graduate of the Alberta School of Business with a bachelors in Business Economics and Law, a minor in Political Science, and a Certificate in Leadership. Currently, she is working on a full-length manuscript as well as an album of spoken word poetry.

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LCP Cold Moon Contests

The Broadsheet Contest. What is a broadsheet? By definition, a broadsheet is a large piece of paper printed with information on one side only. In the world of poetry, a broadsheet is a great format in which to share or showcase one stand-out poem – winning this contest will surely do both! The Broadsheet Contest is a single poem contest seeking poems of 40 lines or less.

The League of Canadian Poets’ Cold Moon Contests, comprising of the Very Small Verse Contest and Broadsheet Contest are run annually November 15 – January 20, and winners are announced on World Poetry Day (March 21).