Foster Gareau is a queer French-Canadian poet, sentimentalist, former member of the unhoused, and alcoholic in recovery with a degree in Cinema Studies. In 2025, his work appeared in PRISM international, Frozen Sea, Periodicities, carte blanche, Yolk Literary, & Change, and elsewhere, and he was shortlisted for the 2025 Vallum Chapbook Award. He writes every day.
“I wrote ‘Impressions’ in conversation with Edvard Munch’s Mélancolie III (1902), specifically the third state of the woodcut, in which the figure looks slightly misregistered, as if the years have nudged him out of alignment. I treated those visible re-cuts and smudges not as technical evidence but as emotional misprints, the kind a life lived accumulates. In the poem, I let the sitter speak back to the printmaker, confessing what the ink knew before he did. I’m fascinated by the process of editing, revision, and drafts and how these catch both the intention and the accident. This piece is my attempt to listen to that final state and let its imperfect outline talk. I admit as well to a sort of small kinship with Munch’s figure by the shore: perpetually reflective, slightly smudged by weather and worry, waiting for someone off-frame to tell him if he’s still the same shape he was yesterday.”
Truly, sir, I had meant to not be unsmiling—truant for joy—
it’s just that my sorrow spread
in ink along the shoreline curve
had had
no time to dry
before you pressed me there.
Through soot-film blur,
no longer the boy
who wrote unto myself alone,
who kept near-coast,
who couldn’t know,
for so long,
how cold the snow,
how cruel the wind blows.
Nor was I yet the man
who treads a dusty road
just out of earshot,
whose sole stamps
and steps, like words,
are living matter
as fluid and vital,
as chisel-clean,
as seminal seed.
And you, sir—quiet at the press,
fondling your toy—
you must have seen it then:
how the years had smudged my features,
how you printed more than posture,
how the words I meant to write,
for aging men in private
who settle in the woodgrain,
who don’t know they have changed.
