The Glacier
Issue Four
Winter 2025

I couldn’t hold your hand in your hometown

But in towns along I-29
where we were anonymous
people would smile at the way
you looked at me, the way my entire body
wrapped itself around yours to kiss you. 

There were baristas and museum docents 
who believed us to be a proper couple. 
It was welcome to have our love 
celebrated, if only by passing strangers. 

A homeless couple stopped us in the street,
asked if we had any money. The man
mistook me for your wife. I would’ve given him
my entire life savings if I had it on me. 

We ate dinner that night like we were rich—
appetizers, mocktails. We wrote each other cards
from across the table. In Kansas City, we were served
by a woman named Destiny.

Panera Bread Absolution

I cannot claim goodness 
so let me instead claim my sins:
I have left a marriage, drank with wild
abandon, bore a child I couldn’t 
care for, found love in a hopeless marriage. 

The way his wife looked at me, I knew I
repulsed her. Perhaps she believed that would 
scare me away. She didn’t know I was born 
with an adversary instead of a mother.

That the way she loathed me was so familiar 
it felt like the sun on my face from both sides—
her hating me, him adoring me. 
What I’ve known and what I’ve dreamed—
being both unforgivable and loved like 
that doesn’t even matter.

Anteater

Your son asks my favorite animal, asks you to send 
me a picture of flowers and tell me 
they look like my beautiful face. 

I’ve never met the kid. 

But he’s my little pen pal while we wait 
out the litigation, the endless string of emails 
from your wife, barring me from knowing him. 

What she doesn’t know (or maybe does) is the
invisible string attaching me to him, him to me. 
Two kids desperately wanting to be 
known completely and loved for it. 

I’ve never met the kid and yet 
there is so much of his story I recognize:
the parts you tell me, the parts
no one says. 

I once was a kid no one
trusted to make my own choices, to speak
for myself. I’ll let your son tell me anything. 
If he never runs out of words, all the better.

Holly Pelesky writes poetry, essays, and fiction. She has an MFA and an MLIS from midwestern institutions. Her prose can be found in CutBank, Chautauqua, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, other places. Her collection of letters to her daughter, Cleave, was published by Autofocus Books. She works as a librarian and a writing center consultant while raising boys in Omaha.

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