The Glacier
Issue Four
Winter 2025

Children of Paradise

I.
When the yogi says “triangle pose”
I wobble on stanchions of metacarpal hope with

good bones the doctor called “thick”
so I clock this leaden weight forever, as

something other 
than the feathersome girl.

II.
Jump cut: many years later (what doesn’t feel like years), onset
of age. Osteopenia. Occasional words looser than tossed scrap

exit from recall, sink
toward Miyazaki worlds

through soil ruffled under furnaces as anime mice
scurry across sub-basements lined with vocabulary,

titles, plots, the burnished names of starlets, who 
swing in the “out” doors,

though I can always summon my run-away father’s

favorite film, as if he’d been mumbling
all this time, up through his ashes in a Maryland yard.

III.
Of ashes: 
I know they do not root 

but fear their rooting.

They do not speak, but I fear their speaking—
they say, you are not

my one true love, and I will clamber, mime-like
from the balcony, not-girl, not-daughter, to haul

his duffel of sorrows

or pluck the fallen blossoms
up from their million wages.

Sentences on Slates

One is the mottled pane,
two is her grown child,
three is my upper body
in the pitch throat of a boa constrictor
even when I say please and thank you,
it sucks me back
to the deepest hair roots and fractions
of our Ashkenazic, Jewish mix
and her child’s Afro-Caribbean blood,
which oceans their fury
for a family who never said “black” as if we couldn’t see—
so busy distancing from shtetls.
Dear beloved grandmother, who gripped her palms
and teethed cracked skin from her winter lips
or stooped in woolen sweaters 
over thick skirts and books: 
Cassandra of the house
you could and could not predict
our broken love, or the ways that memory
and art could ruin us.

Athenaeum

You go . . . last / why are you wearing a raincoat

when it isn’t raining, they said, or where 
was the tail on my horse

why was there smoke spooling out of the chimney
when it’s obviously summertime with that high flower

big as the house? Are the flowers truly that tall
are they taller than your father?

It looks like a little boy wearing that dress o that’s you!
There is no such thing as a blue tulip. 

Lunch, they melt M&M’s on the chipped radiators
and eat them.

Poor Gilbert Stuart, his portrait of George Washington
covered in spit balls. The children here

eat lead. They do not survive.

Rebecca Reynolds has published two books of poetry, Daughter of the Hangnail and The Bovine Two-Step (New Issues Press). Her first book received the 1998 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and her third book, Otherly, received the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award, and is forthcoming in 2025. She has received a Hopwood Poetry Award from the University of Michigan and a New Jersey State Council on the Arts grant. She teaches Creative Writing at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, and he grew up in Washington, D.C.

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