The Glacier
Issue Four
Winter 2025
CUCUMBER
I cut the heart out of a perfect
adolescent cucumber
in order to complete the proportions
for my soup, and then the instant
I turned on the blender, shallot, garlic,
dill, lemon, Greek yoghurt flowed
like cold lava out of the base
onto the counter
cascading over the little white ant-hotel
(the hotel where they check in
and never check out), to the edge
of the chopping
block, and yada—
I quickly poured what remained in the
jar into a container
because what’s a little axle grease
ill-fitting rubber gasket
in Friday night’s dinner.
That beautiful perfect cucumber growing
sideways on the trellis in the moonlight
or streetlight, my headlamp, or whatever.
Is it true cucumbers, tomatoes, and their friends
grow more vigorously at night, in the dark,
as, supposedly, children do?
I’d sent Julien a picture, and he said
my gardening was a waste of time,
and, again, that I should live in an apartment.
When I woke, the morning glories,
deep purple-blue and lavender
their vines overtaking the columns,
winding down the spout from the gutter
on the porch. All volunteers reseeded this summer,
filling their bowls with light.
Nessy told me she was breathless
making a life for her lover and her—her house a sanctuary,
her butternut squash and
herbs overflowing,
the wind chime, the low light, the vases.
Which built toward nothing—he took
and took and hid her from half
of his obnoxious family.
They had a showdown and he left. Because
he was in his forties, and he was “dating.”
I sacrificed the perfect cucumber I’d been nurturing,
because I was worried the other, mature, one
I’d picked days ago
wasn’t doing well waiting in the fridge. Because
I wanted to have something ready for dinner
for Julien’s arrival. Because I knew I’d be in his
arms and unable to cook. He comes so infrequently.
When he’s gone, he says “What relationship? What
future?”
My happiness is walking circles on the bouncy-
surface track next to the high school.
Once I walked against the grain to find my late-night
friend Norah in her silver-spangled reflector vest,
Indian-print tunic with random-seeming flaps, pajama-looking
pants and a tiny cloth crossbody
purse—who lost her beloved in the pandemic
as I did, though in her case, due to
natural causes. Who appeared
in the mist like a wraith
and had come to join me.
It took me five years after my husband left
to stop thinking of the high school where we
ferried the children for years as a mausoleum.
Five years to stop thinking of my house
as a funeral parlor. A memorial of the years
I was loved.
There’s another cucumber, dangling
vertical, and who knows how it grew
last night—and there are
Bobby’s Outsider Tarot cards, which—ha!—I’d
thought did not apply to me! That bougie
privileged wasp-y shit my mother told
me to be so grateful for—dies hard. She knew
it was a sham. She was in a rage her whole life,
caught in the machinery.
Today is her 99th birthday, my brother points
out, and how is it, I wrote to him, that I missed her.
The oracle tells me, give it up. Loneliness is your
moment. Your husband has someone to hold
every night, and worse, touch.
It says let it burn. Let it burn. Till the holy
light comes, the blender o-ring recovers or
I replace the whole darn thing so I can make
pesto. I say thank you to my lover for driving
from Windsor, Ontario. I let him hold me. I ask
him to hold me. And we eat the possibly-
questionable cucumber soup—I bought Fresh
Thyme sour dough bread—heated till the crust was crunchy
slathered vegan butter
on the delicious, tender doughy part I should not be eating.
I let him tell
me he doesn’t believe in monogamy—
The plants on the deck have names—except
the basil—whose name is Basil—Jake, large
tomato plant. Stephen beleaguered
pepper plant making witchy suspicious looking
red peppers, and Amber, smaller tomato plant (smaller
pot, smaller cage). Tilda is the Heliconia.
It was Julien’s idea to use the blasting
sunlight on the deck instead
of praying over the half-deprived side
garden (shade of the crabapple), elm-dappled
greens-only raised garden in the back.
I give up. I really do. I scooped the seeds
from the beautiful cucumbers, the mature
and the adolescent, before I chopped them up
and put them in Abednego’s cold fire.
Come eat with me. Hold me.
BRAIN ON FIRE—LIVING UNDER A DICTATORSHIP, I AM AFRAID OF EVERYTHING
“It was my thirtieth anniversary.
All the stewardesses flew to the ceiling.
It dropped 400 feet,
then 400 more feet.
There was a little Muslim girl
next to me—she looked really scared.
I said It’s okay. This happens on airplanes
all the time. Meanwhile I feared
for my life.” Sitting
on the bench putting on my neon pink dance
shoes for Zumba, I ask,
“What airline?” “United, I think.”
The private column. The private dark.
I’m listening to the Washington Post
through my portable speaker.
Why did the man write into Eric
the Philadelphia advice columnist
and say he needed to stop his
mother-in-law? She had been diagnosed
with “cognitive impairment” and wouldn’t stop
booking cruises. Sometimes she didn’t
even know what city
she was in! Eric hops on board with
ideas about how to stop the mother.
Why? Jesus Christ! Why not
let her wander? Why not let her get
away from the dark past, the crowded house
where she raised her children, from the
cats who keep going on and on—the bumpy
yard where she drags the trashcans
every Monday night wearing her headlamp
and the pilling hoodie her husband forgot
to take when he went elsewhere.
Why begrudge her this? It seems so cruel.
I’m near a lightning rod and that other thing.
The green, lush place where flooding
wind can be a danger.
Paradise,
and then there’s the nasty wire.
Vein, schism, of mica.
Lightning rod, brain on fire.
Water encroaching much further
than the little stonework surrounding
the “Southernmost” placard—what is it:
a bullet? a bomb? Ah, a buoy.
Autoimmune
encephalitis. Anti-NMDA receptor—It’s random.
It’s the luck of the draw. (The whole city’s
been flooded, water rushing through the
crawl spaces of the houses.)
In Zumba, the instructor
faces us,
claims to be doing
the salsa, the tango.
To wear the Zumba logo on one’s pant leg,
it is necessary to do these mind games
alternating counting switching direction—
They’re trying to mix up
the old people.
Knock them over.
I mean they’re required to do
a certain number of things
to knock us over.
Shining palm tops.
They’re trimming them today, heavy noisy trucks block by block—
don’t want hurricane force wind
and rain getting caught in the mop tops
and bringing down green leather-sheathed
footballs—coconuts strewn on the street.
There’s a house next door to mine
that’s just like mine
a shotgun I’m guessing.
The few rooms lined
up like train cars. As I was walking
by, on my way to
the 5:30 twelve-step meeting,
I heard a slam—like a screen
door—footsteps on some wooden
stairs, a woman
moving off,
rapidly. She seemed
like she’d just been
shouting. I wondered what her
work was, dressed like that,
at 5 p.m.
Her tail snapping
in a full-length black flowy dress;
a shower of sparks
falling to the street
behind her.
I WILL REMAIN IN NEUTRAL
Maybe it’s the days ending early.
The darkness coming down.
Maybe it’s some intergenerational thing
from my mother.
Maybe it’s handing over my work
to new people.
For the first time since I began.
And having to trust them.
And having to learn to behave, to
be incisive without being
cruel, with theirs. Maybe it’s even
worries about money. About
maybe my “forced expiration date.”
November was never good.
Lightbox and woodstove and horse
sometimes happy in the smallish
arena in the dark barn. Christy went
over and over those 90-degree
turns, whatever they’re called. At the
end she demonstrated “haunches
in,” “haunches out,” and Beach put up with it.
Maybe it’s the six weeks
she was out for neck surgery. Beach’s happiness
that she is back and that
our teasing and bickering, our dissing our
partners (I almost said “husbands”),
her yelling at me for being an idiot
then praising me in the next breath
for not being remotely as bad on this horse
as her other students. Maybe
it’s the dark. It’s not even cold. It stopped
being bitter. The woman at the Y
fished my bathing cap out of the sauna for me.
Got her keys and went in.
I saw my friend Dezzy who’d lost her
car keys and then I heard over
the loud speaker they were turned in
at the front desk. She said she
saw her professor—at the Y, no less—
who said her ceramics studio
needed cleaning up! I met her sunny
children, weighed down with backpacks
from their couple hours in the “Kid Zone."
I was driving home, in neutral.
I was thinking of asking Julien if we
could talk later. I was hoping my salmon
wasn’t too hot in the cold pack. I was in neutral.
I mean the car was in drive
but apart from dreading scooping
cat litter yet again and dragging trash
and recycling across the dark
yard to the bins on the alley, I was
all right. The pretzel machine at the Y had been broken,
but I found a container of raspberries
that I’d just bought but forgotten
in with the fish in the cooler.
All was well. Patti Smith was on the radio
and I was resenting that she’s
a New Yorker. So damn superior and sophisticated.
Is it too late for me? Was the theme.
I love them in truth. Their gruff affection.
Well, warmth that almost feels
like affection. I am a lonely person. And, of all
places, they don’t laugh at me for it.
The drive was going fine. I was swooping down, then up
the hill where Katrina’s house is, where
I took a meal to her and Dan after their
son died. They’re lost now. They
are ravaged. 39 years old. Meth-head, with
swastikas tattooed on his neck.
Who’d put in time in prison but had had
periods of sincere sobriety.
Who had already been
giving them fits in other words. Died
of ALS. I’m driving the down/up cresting hill
back downhill which is not scary
when there is not snow (which there was!
a few days ago! Falling thickly).
Patti Smith was talking
about a book of 366 days
she made. Turns out she had a bronchial
thing, hence the crusty voice, and hence
her near total isolation—with her photos
and memories—during the pandemic.
How you could look through randomly and see
what she chose in the way of a photo
and her remarks about it on any given day.
Then she was onto talking
about a club in New York, a bunch of initials
I don’t remember.
How she had a photo
from the night before it closed for good.
Flowers had been delivered. She realized her photo
of the last flowers seemed
fitting for the date. The flowers were calla lilies.
And then I was there again:
Last winter, (insanely) sitting in on my
ex-husband’s class (as he was my
only teacher my whole writing life since grad
school and I loved the topic of the class),
I learned he’d taken up ice skating. My daughter
was visiting from Europe. I was at the Y.
And she called and said Where are you? I told
her. It was very cold and icy. She said
I’ll just ride my bike over there. I need to get
to Dad. He’s in his apartment. He hurt
his shoulder skating. It’s bad. He called me and
asked me to take him in his car to the
hospital. I said okay. It would take me awhile to
get over there to pick her up.
When I left the Y, I went to the hospital where
I’d guessed she’d taken him.
I saw a car in the lot I thought was his. I pulled
up not knowing what to do.
Was his girlfriend in the ER with him? Was it
my place (it pains me to use
those words) to talk to the doctor? Would Eleanor
know what to do? I called El and
she answered and I said I was outside. It was bitter
cold and dark and icy but not snowing.
I talked to him for a minute. I looked up his
Injury on my phone. It said a broken humerus
was one of the most painful injuries one can get.
I talked to him on the phone.
He said he’d been going too fast and swerved
to avoid hitting some kids who’d
cut him off. (A replica, more or less, of his
near-fatal bike accident
the May when we were still together
after his brother died.) He said
his girlfriend was busy taking her daughter
to her percussion lesson (I thought
Jesus Christ). I got Eleanor on the phone
and said pain management
is essential. This is one of the most
painful injuries. (And both she
and the girlfriend dropped the ball the next
day and left him alone
for almost 24 hours—I wept when Eleanor
told me.) I went to look in the car
for some reason. I saw the cushion, tossed
in the back seat, I had used
for years to lift myself a little in the bucket seat.
It was floral and had belonged
to my mother. Then on the other side of the
back seat, in the foot well, I think,
a bucket of flowers. Copious, copious flowers
he must have been planning to
take to her (so many!). I had to look
them up later to remember
what kind they were. They were calla lilies,
each one a creamy white scroll,
like a story, or a letter.
Dana Roeser’s fifth book, I Wake to a Life in Which the Beds Keep Moving, is winner of the Sexton Prize and is forthcoming from Black Spring Press Group (Eyewear, London, UK) in 2026. Her fourth book, All Transparent Things Need Thundershirts, won the Wilder Prize at Two Sylvias Press and was published in September 2019. She is also the author of The Theme of Tonight’s Party Has Been Changed, recipient of the Juniper Prize, as well as Beautiful Motion and In the Truth Room, both winners of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize. Among her many awards and honors are the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, the Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and numerous residencies in the U.S. and abroad. She teaches in the MFA program in poetry at Butler University and has also been a visiting writer in the MFA programs at Purdue and Wichita State Universities. Recent poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in North American Review, Poem-a-Day, The Glacier, DIAGRAM, Mississippi Review, Guesthouse, Barrow Street, and The Laurel Review. Other poems (and translations) have appeared in New Ohio Review, Poetry, The Florida Review, Seneca Review, Southern Humanities Review, Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Green Mountains Review, Crazyhorse, PI Online, Notre Dame Review, Southern Review, Southwest Review, Pleiades, Alaska Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Antioch Review, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry Daily, and others. For more information, please see www.danaroeser.com.
Artwork by Jennifer Gurney.
© The Glacier 2025. All rights reserved.
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