The Glacier
Issue Four
Winter 2025

Master Salt

There are rules—he leans to kiss you in the driveway and you think of his neighbors and draw back. They’ve seen his wife receive a similar kiss here, but how could it be similar?

So many tender buttons—you think of tinder and Tinder and legal tender and tenderness, which can mean to be kind and gentle, but also to feel pain.

You think of his bald salt shaker with a round, self-satisfied face. Salt cellar. Seller. Basement. The single bed you’ve shared with him there. Not the marriage bed.

The master salt stays in place; it isn’t passed. Salinum. Standing salt. Tears. Lot’s wife. Rabbit startled still in the tan grass just exposed by melted snow.

The little bridge over the irrigation ditch you cross to reach his house. Water the color of whatever’s under or above it, that blood-red pool in a magazine, the ocean, gray under gray sky.

Or what’s in it, silt, bits of rotten leaves, mud. Movable, these pieces. But not changeable. And not interchangeable.

His chess set. The curdled carton of half & half, yellow plastic water-wings crumpled in a corner of the garage, dull razor on the edge of a tub, her striped one-piece on a hook.

Tromboncino

So many things are not what they seem—for example, your ring, burnished gold not unlike
the squash propped on this market bench—not crookneck, but Tromba d’Albenga, heirloom.

Burnished means polished by rubbing, but burnished gold, the color, is a yellowish brown also called pinchbeck—alloy of copper and zinc. Fake gold.

I’m in love with these squash lined up like ocean swells. Like that picture of a swan thanking
its rescuer, circling his neck with its neck, head on his shoulder, orange bill calm against his chest.

I’m skeptical of that picture. Of the disposition of swans. Of my arms around your neck. The bodily curves of the squash, their smooth tan skin.

And of that anthology of poems more full of fear of love than love. Isn’t It Romantic? Maybe you’re the swan and I’m the man.

I think of the photo you sent—your elbow encased in the white net you removed from a pear, meant to prevent bruising. Unlike most summer squash, this is moschata, not pepo.

Unharvested, it hardens, ambers, becomes tromboncino: a small trombone. Also a cone-shaped grenade-launcher for canisters of tear gas. Also the flower called narcissus.

Henrietta Goodman is the author of four books of poetry: Antillia (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), All That Held Us (BkMk Press, 2018), Hungry Moon (Colorado State University, 2013), and Take What You Want (Alice James Books, 2007). She is co-author (with the poet Ryan Scariano) of a chapbook titled Flicker Noise (Bottlecap Press, 2024). Her poems and essays have been published in The New England Review, New Ohio Review, Terrain, Bennington Review, River Teeth, Cleaver, and more. She teaches in the English department of Rocky Mountain College in Billings, MT.

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