The Glacier
Issue Four
Winter 2025

New Year, New You

Good morning, beautiful Gomorrah. 
Are you elevating your platform? 
Are you maximizing your organic reach 
and leveraging connections with people who matter? 

The sun’s rising, indifferent, over
your glass-stained windows. Please take a moment
to review data-driven insights
on your professional dashboard. 

At the after-after-after party, 
we play dead among the hyacinths. I row
a gondola through a river of sand; you practice
your handshake in an empty bathroom. 

According to Biblical scholars, 
the twin cities weren’t destroyed because of sex or lust. 
The people were arrogant, the people were cruel, 
they ridiculed the poor and tortured those 

who showed mercy to strangers: 
a girl offering a traveler water, an act for which 
she was stripped naked, drenched in honey,
and left to the bees, who slowly stung her to death. 

Her cries reached God; he destroyed 
her destroyers. Like hammering nails 
into a pinecone, I am pointing toward beauty 
with all the wrong tools. I am waking up

in a land that loves and hates itself, 
then loves, then hates, then loves itself—
perpetually flipping a coin across 
the days the weeks the months the years. 

It makes no difference what 
your virtues are; your vices will define you. 
The sun’s still hiding in its hood of smoke. 
I’m coming for you, moon, 

though you’re the last thing 
on my mind in a world of terrible, wonderful 
minds, wondering as they wander 
through deserts made of glass.

Think of It This Way

In the study of forgetting, researchers say the best memory
is the one that figures out what to erase.
Recollection, recollection, recollection. Which survives?

Last year an owl escaped the zoo, then reappeared in Central Park.
He was a kept bird, a captive, but he learned how to hunt on his own.
Now he has eighty thousand followers. 

That winter my upstairs neighbor called me, desperate,
to shovel the dead rat from her icy front porch. 
Yes, of course I’ll help.

At times it feels good to be pulled in two directions;
wanting to keep and discard the same thing. The rat and the memory
of the rat. Strikethrough: a small kind of liberation. 

Yesterday, a mourning dove, frozen on the doorstep. Today
a dead bat, hanging by one wing from a second-story shutter.
Online, a request: Please follow me on my journey.

The owl’s home, no matter where, is always a tree. In my mind
the rat survives, rolls over, and crawls back under the house.
Ignorance is unforgiveable bliss, I am beginning to understand.

Gown of Sharks, or Chess for Dummies

Give me the puzzle, I’ll do it, says every first-born daughter—
I’m not holding my horses. I won’t wait for the other shoe to drop.

No, I don’t want a chunky loafer. I don’t want to rock a bold lip.
This is me, politely asking the algorithm to unfollow my every move.

Reentering the family drama, I’m reminded who is not talking to whom.
I make my bed right before I lie back down in it, the quilt squares

perfectly smooth. I pace myself in arguments. I look inside and count
to ten. A dead bird flaps its wing from the pavement. Hello, hello.

I don’t want a fit-and-flare cut or a ruffled midi, a color block
essential or a barely-there bikini. I will not click on demand.

There’s something thrilling about a stalemate. How many moves, really,
do we have left? Turns out it wasn’t worthwhile to have bitten off the matter

with a smile. I never know what people want, but always use the right bait.
Wearing a gown of sharks, the Queen advances to take the rook.

Jennifer Moore was born and raised in Seattle. She is the author of Easy Does It (2021) and The Veronica Maneuver (2015), both from the University of Akron Press, and a chapbook of centos, Smaller Ghosts (Seven Kitchens Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bennington Review, Ploughshares, Tupelo Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She is a professor of creative writing and lives in Bowling Green, Ohio.

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