The Glacier
Issue Four
Winter 2025

Nightmares

My father returns to me after his death
He comes in red nightmares to flash warnings 
Here tonight he paints the west wall bright green 
And then he dies Another untrue funeral 
And he’s saying not the destination but 
The way Maybe I’m asleep again 
Here in my sleep I know
How time ends and rewinds and ends
Undoes itself Un-dies itself How gentle the universe 
Unfolding bends as paper and then extends
So So Here he is undead again walking around 
In the dream and he’s come to me to give me a secret
And in the next one he’s in that plain pine box
Then there he is
Running his cigarette under the kitchen faucet 
It goes Sssst

Mike

Had this friend mike no real mutuals tbh no where 
the full dull pain to go when I heard he died in 2016 
met working at a T.G.I. Friday’s in Poughkeepsie 
after college got drunk at a local statue and climbed it 

Kept the secret parts a secret

Idk how he died no one told me 
His mom posts memorials to his page
I heard they believe in god and stuff
He wasn’t into that but I kinda hope he was wrong 
and he’s somewhere nice 
I think he’s just in the ether now
A bunch of particles spread with no consciousness 

You think you deserve a good life, no
(you’re an animal 
could be burning in a fire)

Disarmament

I wish today was a melty saxophone but I’m a fool for good impossible things
I think we’ve got time to explore 

I’m getting old so I’m mostly out of touch with passion
Fluid mechanics

Deep deep deep freeze

Early history of armaments were just these fancy joys of death
But these ones are super dead

It’s too painful now to be hopeful

This kid on the playground just wants to enjoy the monkey bars
The kid on the beach just wants to build a sand volcano or a castle

But then like the same kid or a totally different kid gets shot down
By another angry kid     I’m so sick of what men do

A kid from my town used to draw hateful shit in a regular school notebook
While I served him malted milkshakes at the luncheonette

We’re planning wars a hundred years out    Plane designs
Armed winged insects full of death float for artillery hover with grace

A sad harmonica 
Moves through the sky to chase the weapons

Fear argues deterrence

A standoff is unsustainable

Dessert

i’m a modern kind of muffin
i like all the all the berries
in me all the all i can be i
can be a pastry, a costume,
a flake with the melted flesh
inside. sugar added. sugar
add the heat to me and let
me fall apart into the
sweet the will of me broken
and my skin getting thin.
jam the heart a dark plum
of mess. marionberry, blood
cherry, the teeth you open
me with.

Bake


meringue again
lollipop the dog's gone 
out the pie is on
 
the table baked
and suffering i've got
a body too awake
 
morning let me
steam the sun heats up
the dew till it lifts
 
unburdened away
i have never left you
not really not not
 
drunk not without
saying later oh please
come i've made
 
something
new for you

to eat

Dana Jaye Cadman’s debut poetry collection Nova is winner of the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award, forthcoming 2026. Her work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in North American Review, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, New England Review, Southeast Review, Four Way, Conduit Magazine, and elsewhere, and her stories in Okay Donkey Magazine, Saturday Evening Post, and Mystery Tribune. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and a Pushcart Prize, placed as finalist in the Jake Adam York Prize, Georgia Poetry Prize, Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, Barry Hannah Prize for Fiction: Radical Futurism, the Great American Fiction Contest, longlisted for the Uncharted What the Wild Carries Prize, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Professor and Director of Creative Writing at Pace University, Pleasantville. Find her work at danajaye.com

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