The Glacier
Issue Four
Winter 2025

Hopper Light in the Hospice Room

The hospice hallway is a river. I pace along the banks, nod to the kind ones who ferry the dead. After months of the Holter monitor popping, I sit in a chair, depression—era blue, as the last light creates geometric shapes on the walls and floors. I argue with someone on an Edward Hopper fan page; who claims the people in Hopper’s paintings are sad and lonely. If you’d like to argue, what about the light? It’s incongruous to the windows. As for the people, aren’t they doing what we do when we are alone? I whisper to you; It won’t be long, but who knows? One day, we are all light signatures. Protagonists trapped—doomed to repeat capitulating into the portal.

2 Star Reviews

I wanted to read this book but it’s a weird shape.
          It cut my fingers half hour into reading it. 
This book is a bummer.
          I expected some sort of profoundness or existential thinking. 
Unpleasantly Long.
          This book made me angry, or maybe I was dehydrated and hungry.
Annoying in parts. 
          This reads like poetry. I loved it. 1star. 
Didn't arrive in hardcover as listed.
          Thirty-four pages of this hammer smacking into my head.
More an experience than a read. 
          A hedgehog will never be philosophical.
Perhaps other books are better.
          Big paper Slinky that is very difficult to hold, read or put away. 
The reader of this book is in danger of being spooked.
          Different Sprinkles – Same Donut.
Poorly aged strip mall for your bookshelf.
          This book will throw a large number of people off track.
I rated one star accidentally. It’s a grate book.
          I like a 'meaty' book, but I like some potatoes too.
The author used the word “says” more than 1000 times. 
          The author thinks she is "special.”	
This book desperately needs to go play in traffic.
          Fifteen people found this helpful.

Stages of Love

You shot holes through my roof. I cut cold butter into cubes for your toast. On the curb, a free Radio Flyer Rocking Horse never ridden. You say, What happened!? Rather than, Pardon, I didn’t hear that.

Still in blue light—
Two swans in fog and mourning
Leaves’ psithurism.

Night Terrors

The cause of night terrors is unknown, though research suggests they happen when consciousness is caught between deep stages of sleep and waking, and it’s in those deep blues—right as I fall out—that I see the silver-eyed woman, agitated, arms akimbo, meeting the boy in the black and white striped shirt whose face is cupped in his red hands, and the black dog sitting on his haunches, attentive but relaxed, while on other nights I try to shape my mouth around the names of the dead—a paralysis—it’s you, I try to say, before I’m off again into the blue box of my brain, where small children whisper—I tell them to count, pretend to sleep.

Mary Lou Buschi (she/her) authored 3 poetry collections. Her 3rd, BLUE PHYSICS, 2024 (Lily Poetry Review) was a finalist for Contemporary Poetry in The International Book Awards and a distinguished favorite for Independent Press Award. PADDOCK, 2021 (LPR) was nominated for The Four Quartets Prize through The Poetry Society of America. Her poems appear in The Glacier, Ploughshares, Verse Daily, among many other literary magazines.

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