The Glacier
Issue Four
Winter 2025

Seasoned

The lodgepole pines answer the windstorm in sap.
Theirs are the most fragrant lesions of this land.
Stick with me. 
What I want to say is that I have no dreams 
to force on the children.
I have no children.
Strand and I traipse long and far across the forest.
We take our golden dog. We wade through the dieseled 
murk of the dunes. 
We end up wet. Murphy limber tailed.
I assemble nest after nest out of marine rope 
and end up bored
by their loudness. 
Gloopy baubles ooze 
from the sharded pine trunk
we haul out of the street to the yard. Murphy’s tags chime
as he herds us together.
A year from now all such scars will be seasoned. 
We’ll burn them.
We’ll listen as they hiss and evaporate from where
they were born and where they lived
fixed all their days 
to their bucked up, broken thrones.

Lauren Mallett’s poems appear in Poetry Northwest, Puerto del Sol, The Seventh Wave, The Night Heron Barks and other journals. She lives on Clatsop land of Oregon’s north coast. www.laurenmallett.com

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