The Glacier
Issue Four
Winter 2025

Character Study

You liked to close your eyes until
the room became itself: an image of a room
with you inside it. In the novels you read, 
it was the insignificant details you clung to,
the details that rose up out of themselves, 
coming to mean more than they were:
a hotel in the direction of the sea,
where a man had intended to go,
became a sea within the absence of a sea
and you could not stand beside it.

You imagined your earliest memories:
a baby blue stroller, your brother wearing skates 
alone outside the house, the street where all
the children played, the blue streams of the pavement.
When did you start to think in symbols? 
It didn’t make sense to call what you read real
but it was real when you read it,
as real as a voice speaking now in your mind–
a different voice inside of you 
making you speak
your own sensation. 

It is easier to think this way,
to become like other people.
You tried to find a way to makes things
somehow different than they are.
And when you found you could not tell a story,
you told yourself this one:
the inverted world 
in which the mind realized its opposite
was not the opposite of anything 
but the real thing now evoked.

Expressionism

The paintings were all tall and dark.
A psychic blend of form and color–
abstraction melded into form
or form recalling abstraction.
I found the markings tedious, 
the sharp edge of a knife. 
When I was nineteen, I’d lived with a painter 
who’d worked with a painter who’d kept 
jars of pee in his attic. 
He’d work and I’d sit in the corner
reading Rimbaud. I didn’t know
my life would be like anything. 
Paintings lined the edges where the ceiling
met the wall.
He kept a drawing of a whalebone
in a shoebox. 
Blue pigment on 
a palette knife, 
the last unending color
kept within a perfect bed of stillness
behind glass. 
I wanted memory to make it seem special,
thought thinking it might make it so.
The themes were life death dread abandon,
the eminent sublime.
I liked the anonymity
of desktop screens and counters
the concrete building and the ice
cold temperatures it housed.

Happy Birthday

Birthdays are for looking
back or for imagining what’s coming
the two of them share qualities
like rugs do or wood doors,

houses built from pre-taxed boxes 
where everything 
is fashion. According to the preordained
romance of stick figures,

I’ve been filling out from nothing
for the sake of yesteryears.
I never knew what to say to anyone,
not how to stand, nor smile.

When I was a child my mother used to tell me
to look natural: “Smile,” she’d say, in the photos with flowers
but I stood in the garden stiffly, gripping hard 
the tulip’s heads.

To smile was to show your teeth, deliberately
willed action. 
I didn’t know the word for natural 
so all the photos turned out bad.

I learned to write my name in preschool. 
The dotted line cut through the C.
That was me, was who I was, my name 
then made of letters.

In the bathtub, a sticker beneath the faucet read:
DO NOT USE SPOUT AS GRAB BAR
I knew I couldn’t 
see the years, only notice

how they changed me: the water 
still touching the top 
of my chest, my chest then 
emerging from it—
(things must be changing somehow now
growing dull or more specific)

the words were just 
the words they were: 
telling you what not to do
using the language of the doing, 

when I learned them 
something vanished: 
too bad it 
went away.

You can move in vague
uncertainties (nothing was 
expected or how was that
for something great?)

You can make yourself into yourself
despite the fluid motion.
Snow falls, about its own
impossible unions, 

conditions making contact
on the edges of a stair.

From here on there will be more of this
accumulation. Accumulation makes
the argument for what was 
candor on the brink.

Mary Helen Callier’s poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, DIAGRAM, Bennington Review, Hopkins Review, Sewanee Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of When the Horses, winner of the 2023 Alice James Editor’s Choice, and is a doctoral candidate in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver.

Back

ISSUE Four HOME