Twenty-Two Spans by Jatin Garg

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. 

The Second Dare by Ryan Boggs

Blondin Performing a Stunt on the Tightrope at Niagara Falls, 1860. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress

Blondin Performing a Stunt on the Tightrope at Niagara Falls, 1860. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress

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Source: Ryan Boggs, 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.

Ryan Boggs is a writer and teacher living in southern Ontario      

 

Before I Met Niagara by Kunal Sharma

sharma
Kunal Sharma

My first lesson in water
was not from a map.

I stood a little apart
while my brother
placed my grandfather into the Ganga.

At Har Ki Pauri,
a priest kept chanting Sanskrit shlokas
without looking up.

The water felt high that day
but the river stayed calm.

That calmness felt strange to me.

Temple bells rang from far away—
not loud, just continuing.

It felt like a sound
meant to say goodbye
when words are not enough.

Later, in Delhi,
I saw another river in passing.

The Yamuna
moving through dust and distance,
as if it had learned
not to expect attention.

Then one day—
a photograph.

Niagara.

I did not understand it at first.

Just water
breaking its own edge
and refusing to stop.

I have never stood there.

But I see it like this:

people leaning hard on railings,
wind pulling at their sleeves,
mist already stuck on skin
before anyone notices.

The sound would not feel like water.

It would feel like something constant
hitting the air.

And beyond it—

the Horseshoe Falls
curving wide,
as if the earth has opened
and forgotten to close again.

I think of how water behaves.

At Har Ki Pauri,
it carried ash, prayer, silence—
And kept moving as if nothing had changed.

At Niagara,
it keeps falling
as if falling is the only thing it knows.

One day I will stand there.

I will not arrive empty.

That moment at the river
will already be inside me—

the priest’s voice,
the bells from far away,
my brother’s hands steady in water,
and me standing aside
not knowing where to look.

All of it
moving quietly together
when I finally face that falling water.

Source: The author, 2026

Kunal Sharma is a poet from Delhi, India. He explore memory, travel, and the emotional presence of landscapes in his writing.

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

 

 

 

 

The Place Where Countries Lean Close by Kunal Sharma

kunal
Kunal Sharma

I came from another part of the world
to see Niagara as a tourist.

But Niagara does not feel unfamiliar.

It feels like something I have already known
without being able to explain where.

A child is running near the edge of sight,
not looking at the Falls for long.

He is more interested in his brother,
in the way they keep running
as if the ground belongs to them.

No one tells them to stop.

They just keep moving
as children do
when something larger is nearby
but not more important than play.

I stand there longer than I expected.

At one point, a sudden gust of wind
pushes the mist into my face.

For a second, I cannot see the Falls at all.
Only water in the air.
Only breath becoming wet.

Then it clears again,
and nothing has changed.

I lower my phone without meaning to.
I do not take the picture I was about to take.

I notice a piece of driftwood
caught in the metal of a railing,
held there as the water keeps pulling below—
a quiet struggle between structure and force
that does not end either way.

For a moment, I find myself looking
for something that looks like damage—
a pause, a weakness, a break in the rush—
but everything holds too firmly,
even in motion.

The ground hums beneath my shoes,
a low pressure I feel more than hear,
as if the earth is carrying something
too large to explain in stillness.

The water does not change
because I am watching it.

It keeps falling
as if it has been doing this
long before anyone arrived
to name it.

People take pictures
and then leave slowly.

Some look back once,
as if checking whether it is still there.

It is.

It does not move closer.
It does not move away.

Niagara does not feel like a place I am visiting.

It feels like something
that has been present in me
without asking permission.

Not a mother.
Not a symbol.

Just something steady
that lets everything else move freely
around it.

I walk back toward the parking lot,
my phone still dark in my pocket,
carrying the cold, wet weight of the air
that will eventually dry
but never leave.

Source: Kunal Sharma, 2026.

Kunal Sharma is a poet from Delhi, India. He explores memory, travel, and the emotional presence of landscapes in his writing.

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

Niagara Falls Poetry Map

map
The Niagara Falls Poetry Project Poetry Map showing the pin for the Underground Railroad

One of the features of the Niagara Falls Poetry Project is the Poetry Map. A link to this map can be found on the menu bar at the top of every page.

The Poetry Map features poems that are linked to a particular place, most in the Niagara Falls vicinity but others both up and down river to the Buffalo / Fort Erie area and to the Niagara-on-the-Lake / Youngstown area, with a few incursions inland to Welland and St. Catharines areas, but they must have some sort of connection to Niagara Falls to get on the map.

The map currently has 84 pins, each marking a specific location, Each of these pins has one poem written out in full attached to it, along with a link to the poem on the Niagara Falls Poetry Project website. If there is more than one poem written about the location then links to these poems are included after the poem that has been written out in full. For example, The poem The Fugitive Slave’s Apostrophe to Niagara by E.D.H. is pinned in Lewiston, NY at the site of the Freedom Crossing Monument on the eastern bank of the Niagara River.  When the pin on the map at Lewiston with the pin title “Underground Railroad” is clicked, the full poem appears along with a link to the poem.

<center>The Niagara Falls Poetry Project poetry map showing the links to more poems in the pin for the Niagara Whirlpool</center>
The Niagara Falls Poetry Project Poetry Map showing the links to more poems in the pin for the Niagara Whirlpool

If you click on the pin labelled “Niagara Whirlpool,” in the middle of the whirlpool when you enlarge the view, you will see the poem  “The Niagara Gorge (as seen from the Whirlpool Cable Car)” by Father James B. Dollard written out in full, as well as a link to the poem. In addition, there are links to 6 other poems relating to the whirlpool that are on the site, with just their author, title, and a link  to the poem. These include Susan Hill Todd’s The Whirlpool of Niagara River Viewed on a Sabbath Morning, James Gay’s Lines of the Death of Captain Webb and four others.

Many poems are very general to the Niagara Falls area, and have no specific location mentioned so are not included on this map. As the Poetry Map was not started until a number of years after the website went live poems that were posted earlier and do have a specific loaction may not appear either. As more poems are added they will be added to the Poetry Map if they have a particular location as their main focus.