The Glacier
Issue Four
Winter 2025

Snake

Now that I’m permanently sick, 
I live in the studio apartment of myself.

The big pines silhouetted by pink dusk

are too far away to smell, 
or hear if there’s wind.

All my appetites have abandoned me.

I’m getting skinny 
living off death’s hors d’oeuvres.

I watch the late light die 
on the mountains, and listen 

for the snake in the word senescence.

God Violence

When a blizzard buries a town, 
I’m on the blizzard’s side.

I root for the earthquake, 
volcano, tsunami, tornado.

I’m vengeful on behalf of my god,
no longer a higher power.

Now we are the higher power,
and our disasters of a higher order.

‘Nature’ is a sad word. A sad god.

By ‘Nature’ I mean 
everything that exists 

except human beings,
and all evidence of us.

The Stone Age

Bomb them back to the stone age,

a guy yells at the TV,
his friends at the bar spurring him on.

Who knows what the women
are laughing about over there

at their own table, but the men
are revved up, riled up, 

enacting a gleeful cartoon
of humans crawling among stones

until the bartender tells them
to knock it off.

Geometry Mistake

I’ve never been able to master
the basics of math—multiplication

and division, girlfriend/boyfriend.

When I use a calculator
I get a different answer every time.

Who cares how long it will take 
Grandma’s bathtub to fill if it’s

filling and leaking simultaneously?

I could not learn anything from him,
my tutor, who spoke in numbers.

Math is one long song of it—
his voice everywhere.

Geometry was more like carpentry.
I could see its reasoning.

It was a bicycle leaning on a tree,
peaceful, abandoned.

Math is never still. Its music surges
and retreats. It never rests.

Geometry’s vectors, points, and planes
stand like a fence against it.

But Math is a river. 
It goes where it wants to go.

Our Cyberhood

On this street of twelve houses

I have four female friends,
all of whom have dogs.

Barb is most active online. 
She named us the Hood.

(As far as online intimacy goes,
it doesn’t hurt that it’s a cul-de-sac).

Out the window I see Barb, Laurie, and Anny
walking their dogs, all six wearing coats.

Terry’s dog has the breed’s
respiratory problems.

Barb often posts evidence of the high jinx
of politicians, their weird 

sexual and religious beliefs,
and the High Court twisting the laws.

None of us believes the world will survive.

Chase Twichell has published eight books of poetry, most recently Things as It Is (Copper Canyon, 2018). A new book, The World It Was, is forthcoming (also from Copper Canyon) in 2026.

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