The Glacier
Issue Four
Winter 2025

Scrolling Self-Portrait

I like a picture of a neon pink chest
gleaming with small white lines that slither 
over pectoral muscles and the blue 
pointed face of a greyhound emerging 
from them. In my nose, the ghost of pain 
from when the corner of a book stabbed 
inside my nostril, two bloody dots across 
the face of the true love from 12 Days of Christmas. 
I have read about how researchers link 
emergency c-sections to PTSD, emotional 
suppression to suicidal ideation, the yellow eyes 
of owls to the brown shoulders of mice. 
I like a picture of a fox diving into snow. 
I like a picture of pasta with cracked 
pepper and broccoli. I like a video of a woman 
in a waist-snatching bodysuit. My love 
whispers to me in the plastic chair The trees 
have gotten older with us, and I watch them 
tendril black against the January navy. 
I block my mother on Facebook, Instagram, 
Twitter. Someone please tell her I cried 
when the poem-feeling came again 
after the tenth week on Lexapro. The textures 
finally stopped separating themselves 
into blobs of dark gray and darker gray, 
ceased floating into zillions of burnt dots 
like space. I can hold my breath in a dark room 
and touch my leather pants, my fox fur coat. 
I can touch my child, his hair, the birthmark 
between his eyes like a wishbone, cherry red. 
I like a video of two boys waiting for food 
from a truck, long thin packages wrapped 
in red and green plastic. The caption says 
they have not eaten in days. I like a graphic 
of how many, how long, how far, how often. 
I like a picture of a man holding a fish, its attitude 
one of surrender, its black jelly eye still pulsing 
in oxygen, sucking it through every pore.

Dorsey Craft is the author of A Brief History of Accidental Inventions, forthcoming from Texas Review Press in 2026, and Plunder (Bauhan Publishing, 2020). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Adroit Journal, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is Assistant Poetry Editor at Agni and teaches at the University of North Florida.

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