The Glacier
Issue Four
Winter 2025

Live Feeds

The sticks in the air we cannot see
holding the sky together. Stitches. 
Smell of a lawn that’s got sun on it.
Someone’s kids, their fingers full of 
mud or chocolate or something from
mother’s purse. We have small powers.
Changing the past is one. Imploding
city buildings on live feeds. Replaying
the implosions later in reverse. Hope
for the Northern White Rhino. Hope
for the cities of the plains. We will purify
our drinking water. In the redo, I’ll pull 
you to me and kiss your cheekbones as 
you sit there telling me to with your eyes.
Something I missed first time around. 
Above my head a flock of small birds. 
If you see them too then I’ll know I am
walking, someday I’ll get someplace.

Feathered Dinosaur

Someone compliments someone 
on a podcast for looking young. 
You must moisturize. And so 
I just moisturized, too. If one dog 
howls at night others will join her. 
Now my fingers are slippery. 
After shopping and a sausage lunch 
my fingers will be slippery again. 
She drew me a feathered dinosaur 
entirely in red ink, handed it over 
and left the room. Top that. 
We'll buy the wine for the holiday 
party tomorrow before the party. 
There'll still be wine in the stores 
tomorrow. The stores will still be 
there. See how even saying that 
these days some chip in the brain 
says but will they? Around here 
you'll see people in the crotch 
of winter with shovels on their roofs.
What can happen to your house 
because of snow that could equal 
never walking again from a fall?
A story of some twenty-six year 
old who dropped from a skyrise 
he'd climbed without ropes to 
take photos of himself in the air. 
They noticed something wrong 
when he stopped posting updates.

These Late Summer Nights When You Exist

The maple leaves out a while so 
blotches and spots have arrived. 
Nothing stays pure for long. And 
who needs pure? We need a dirty 
light to illumine these interior 
corridors, to hold close to the skin 
under our shirt when the rain begins.
There's a river nearby, its sound 
comes in under the trees with arms 
large enough to shelter. If all that 
green can, then let's nick an edge 
and suck the sap ourselves. One 
thimbleful of neutron star weighs 
more than the Himalayas. 
When we can wrap our bologna 
(brains) around that we'll be ready. 
We've looked up the tar spots 
on the Norway maple. They're 
harmless (supposedly) and there's 
nothing we can do anyway. 
We shelter beneath. Last night 
we read humans born on Mars
might constitute a new species. 
You've never been the same since 
the light fell, your mom called out
from down the street, and you 
dropped from the swings, walked 
home through the molten lava.

Christopher Citro is the author of If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun (Elixir Press, 2021), winner of the 2019 Antivenom Poetry Award, and The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015). His poetry chapbook, The Box We Put the World in to Keep a Corner From Shattering, co-written with Steve Castro and Dustin Pearson, is forthcoming from the University of Toledo’s Aureole Press in 2025. His honors include a Pushcart Prize for poetry, a fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation, a poetry award from Columbia Journal, and a creative nonfiction award from The Florida Review. His poetry appears in 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Narrative, The Normal School, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, West Branch, and elsewhere. Christopher is an editorial assistant for Seneca Review and lives in sunny Syracuse, New York.

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