The Glacier
Issue Four
Winter 2025

Self Portrait with Spit-Up Hades

At times I’ve danced 
so hard, even the unseeing 
gods demanded I stop, 
you know, 
running away with it 
like that, vomiting away 
with it like that. I remember 
death is not bad 
for the one who dies. 
I remember 
how language drifts 
down on us 
like granite feathers, 
an over pour of words 
from the attic of fathers 
we split 
and scissor 
with our sharpest wings 
like overripe fruit 
and a prayer 
for rarer weather. Why
did I dive here
when I know the mirror 
knows better? Now I’m 
the lady having a hair day, 
her bad head wedged 
in the down below 
dream, the gutter 
glittered, 
a black diamond lake 
tasting of apricot  
& lassi. When my tongue 
flies apart, 
I fight raw speed 
and swallow trickled 
light 
through warm June rain. 
Should coyotes come 
circling 
in dark of night, 
I promise 
not to feed them 
the spirit sleeve 
I've fastened at my wrist 
with moss. So no
beast sniffs out 
my still wet wounds— 
a little red and scabby, 
a little animal 
around the edges 
where 
I’m still hunting
enough sun 
to make oblivion a scar.

Michelle Bitting was short-listed for the 2024 Cleaver Magazine “Duality” Creative Non-Fiction Award and was commissioned by the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department for her original poem “Twyla” as a finalist in the Paris/Olympiad cultural exchange in September 2024. Recently, poems published by the Poetry Society of New York Jacar Press’s One, and Cleaver Magazine were nominated Best of the Net 2025. She was short-listed for the 2023 CRAFT Character Sketch Challenge, the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize, and named a finalist for the 2021 Coniston Prize and 2020 Reed Magazine Edwin Markham Prize. She is the author of six poetry collections, including Broken Kingdom, winner of the 2018 Catamaran Poetry Prize, and Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist was published in 2024 by C & R Press. Recent poetry appears on The Slowdown, Thrush, Cleaver, The Poetry Society of New York’s Milk Press, Catamaran, SWWIM, and is featured as Poem of the Week in The Missouri Review. Bitting is writing a novel that centers around Los Angeles and her great grandmother, stage and screen actor Beryl Mercer, and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.

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