JESSE KEITH BUTLER is an award-winning poet based in Ottawa, Ontario. He was the winner of the inaugural 2024 ESU Formal Verse Contest and will be a 2026 Writer in Residence at Berton House in Dawson City, Yukon. His poems have been published widely in Canadian and international venues, including Arc Poetry, Pulp Literature, New Verse Review, Blue Unicorn, and On Spec Magazine. His first book, The Living Law (Darkly Bright Press, 2024), is available wherever books are sold. Learn more at www.jessekeithbutler.ca

‘Continuing City’ won first prize in the 2024 ESU Formal Verse Contest and was first published by the English Speaking Union (Victoria Branch, Australia)

Continuing City

For us there’s no continuing city. Road
construction strips our streets raw summer-long
but last year’s potholes still seep through. Unload
your daydreams here and shuffle on this bus
to stiffly jar down Ogilvie. You’re wrong
to hope these unkempt gridlines hum with pity.
Expect the bus to skip your stop. For us
that’s all there is. We’ve no continuing city.

A high-rise will burst bristling from the park
you played in as a child. You’ll curse each truss
that night spans out to frame a ribcage—dark
on urban half-light. Sit back. Don’t ask whether
developers run city hall. For us,
there are no answers. Watch them all shush by—
those half-constructed towers, strung together
like scarecrows, skeletal against the sky.

The bus jolts you alert. Some detour’s sent
you lurching out along the highway. Rest
is nowhere here. The rich live high, while tent
encampments fill the underpasses. Stare
out past your blurred reflection. All our best
intentions meet a slow death by committee.
But gathered through the night, just past the glare,
wait remnants of the discontinued city.

You’ve reached a new development. The bus
drops you and shudders off into the dusk.
There’s no continuing city—not for us.
Rise up through empty floors. The condo of
your future’s there, atop this new-built husk.
Stand by the window. Waves of speckled light
spill past the bulldozed fields you hang above
and ripple out to meet the walls of night.