The Glacier
Issue Four
Winter 2025

Nancy the Nanny of Squirrel Hill: A Valediction

It’s spring in Pittsburgh,
and I wish I knew where yinz were getting drunk.
I’m staying across Tripoli Road
from an elementary school repurposed
for commercial apartments. 
Nothing but the state of your mind
is sadder than the three-quarter roundels
lit bright with halogen
and the cupola bell that will never ring again.
Your mind is not the state of Pennsylvania,
Nancy, but it’s a chasmic state nonetheless,
not a cosmic state but a mind monitored
by nefarious forces in the suburbs of the cosmos.
Near-homonyms, your name and occupation.
You brought a message from the pope
to an Easter Saturday service
at the Anglican church next door
to Max’s Allegheny Tavern.
It was a non-denominational message
germane to the whole city
and by extension every sentient 
and metaphysical being in the cosmos.
They didn’t understand 
what you were telling them.
Nancy, my godmother, I think of you
every time I come to this town
to visit my stepson. He’s a chemist;
his white coat would terrify you.
There are devastating turns
down one-way roads here. 
It’s hard to say “madness” in a poem,
harder to say madness is a maddening turn
down a one-way road.
At times you were the pope, at others
you were communing telepathically
with the pope and Jesus Christ, and I resent
the papalization of your madness.
It makes you sound less dynamic than you were.
I sit in Max’s Allegheny Tavern
looking out at Jonah’s Call Anglican Church
wondering if this is where you drank.
Was your mind inside a whale,
was it the wild leviathan of your mind
that brought you to this city
to care for rich peoples’ awful children?
Rain falls from the awning in elegant
impressionistic strings of beads.
Was it merely an inability to find quiet?
Your seven siblings speaking to each other
in your head all day until the voices amplified 
into disjointed homilies on themes of precious blood
and the assumption? They’re all two states away,
three states away from psychosis and Pennsylvania.
You knew my stepson Ethan when he was just a boy,
after your affair with Billy Joel
and your stint playing rhythm guitar
for the Psychedelic Furs.
You knew Ethan when he was a boy
kicking soccer balls beneath
a stinking sumac. I think I should be thinking
about him and not wondering about your histrionics
in this city long before his birth.
What was your favorite Pittsburgh bar though?
Mine’s definitely Max’s Allegheny Tavern.
What are the three pellucid rivers
of your mind? It was valedictory
in that fieldhouse yesterday afternoon
(a woman spoke of tides and boats
in order to ostensibly speak of things
other than tides or boats),
and something of my life is over;
my life as a parent, now, is over.
Your life in this town still seems
to carry on, the loves you jilted,
the churchgoers you surprised,
still wait in their clerestories, at their altars
for your revelations blasted
from the stark hillsides.

A TV Set

The eye rheums and a disused channel goes to snow,
Zenith Zone 3 maple console in a Columbus bungalow.

A prison pipeline school with caged clocks and blank 
tope stairwells, sets of sets, soundstages, wards

of the hopelessly alive audiences. The inherent sadness
of the conceit delaminates us from the mortal coil.

The after school special delivers in earnest
what might be better said in jest. Ocular occlusions,

a clutch of darlings, pill bottles rattling in a giant purse,
untraceable cocktail of transmissions, iridescence  

in the asphalt, iris in a slick of rain, crows
in the dehisced ash clear as pixelation. A five-speed  

Escort wagon canting in a cratering garage as the Goodwill 
shuttle hauls our toothless mothers on their errands.

Cal Freeman is the author of the books Fight Songs (Eyewear 2017), Poolside at the Dearborn Inn (R&R Press 2022), and The Weather of Our Names (forthcoming from Cornerstone Press). My writing has appeared in many journals, including The Glacier, North American Review, The Poetry Review, The Moth, Oxford American, River Styx, and Witness Magazine. I have been anthologized in The Poet’s Quest for God (Eyewear 2016), RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music (Michigan State University Press 2020), I Wanna Be Loved By You: Poems On Marilyn Monroe (Milk & Cake Press 2021), Of Rust and Glass (Volume II) and What Things Cost: An Anthology for the People (University Press Kentucky 2022). I am a recipient of the Devine Poetry Fellowship (judged by Terrance Hayes), winner of Passages North’s Neutrino Prize, and a finalist for the River Styx International Poetry Prize. I teach at Oakland University and serve as Writer-In-Residence with InsideOut Literary Arts Detroit.

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