The Glacier
Issue Four
Winter 2025
The Eastern Grey Squirrel is Most Active Dawn to Dusk
Mid stride through campus’s oak lethargic brow,
Langston came up on the squirrel tail, & I stopped,
my outsoles grasping at his heels. He—who picked
up the batter yellow gecko that made, like an oil
painting resides in frame, a home of the sealant cracks
in our apartment’s hall—bent on knees used to bike
& juggle laptop & support his weight, like a Tupperware
lid hinged by suction, when pulling me from self-
composed abscess, bloated with tears and vomit, &
reached, the way moths fang for streetlight, the squirrel’s
cauda: its fur that reflected magnolia leaves’ luster,
its white tufts that made seen phantoms of former
movement. Last night, I held the three fingers
that Langston uses to brace the tail, and said, I’m tired.
I’m tired. I’m tired—until he could feel strain in his throat.
grief-solstice
begins september fourth, a month and two days to her passing. this season of drifting—from splitting an oreo’s carapace and scraping out daisy white guts, to seeing her smile frosting chipped and chocolate cookie eclipsed; from kneading dark rye to remembering the ulcered heft of her thighs mattress curdled and malleable, pushed and pulled by my expert’s palms.
when, like a fumbled glass bulb, chill is splintered across the plains i can feel in one palm her pills, cut and shedding chalk into my simian crevices, in the other my last plush of nonage, the hand of a yellow stitched bear named macaroni.
sometimes i yearn to be like a child, picked up at the pits and held to the chest like a cement vase. even though i have always been grounded. even though my face hasn’t known the sustained curvature of caregiver’s chest. even though i was only held until i could crawl. only given space to crawl until i could work.
Ideation
—after Carl Phillips
There’s this spire in my head I keep
making, building with fallen teeth
and sternum to climb, climb and fall
onto, to split myself on molar ridges
and the remnants of ribcage. I wish
to be skewered, to fall from myself,
to fall off the bone of my own making.
Below the spire of masticatory bone
I keep constructing in my head, are
the hands that reach up to catch my
parts and miss. The hands that have
faces in their palms: Iman’s who’s
plum-colored palmar creases make
an expression of strain, my mother’s
freckled, roughed, though perpetually
wide-eyed. I slump like two halves
of a jello cup macheted and sagged
at the force to which the knife met it.
Neither of them are strong enough
to peel me from my landing place.
From above the teeth fall, burgundy,
tarnished, with yuck, yowl and blood.
The hands scoop incisors from gravel
bedazzled with bird shit and rain, and
they put the teeth into their mouths.
The women whose fingers I’ve held
the longest, worried raw their knuckle
eskers with my thumb, reach down.
They put red teeth into their pockets.
Sydney Mayes is a poet from Denver, Colorado. She is the Winner of the 2025 Adrienne Rich Award and the inaugural ONLY POEMS ‘Poet of the Year’. Her poems have been published in The Atlantic, Poets.org, The Hopkins Review, Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Journal and The Kenyon Review among other publications. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Mayes has received scholarships and support from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Community of Writers, Lighthouse Writers and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Her prose is forthcoming in the anthology Between Our Legs: Silence Breaking Stories on Gynecological Health, published by the University of Iowa Press.
Artwork from Pixabay.
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