The Glacier
Issue One
Fall 2022

[silken] [with an ATM in It and a Fetish]

								I’m a ticking time bomb
										overheard on the street

the way exploitation opens up in me you’d think I was
		                a field
	          of poppies

dispensing lifestyle heroin at cut rates
		                      (never mind
	            my nearly 0%)—which is just another way of saying

waking each morning is problematic
		                       and
	          so I add

toil to toil—patching a one third silk shirt
		                  made
	           in China—feminizing self maybe—

boy brain so ingrained with father nurture
		                      it is my nature
	         now—I have to dig

with needle and thread to get it out (the woman
		                       in the house—
	            my wife—

is busy—the fabric I’m using is silk)—
		                    there is
	           a fetish in there somewhere—and

diminishment—am I channeling my own mother now—
		                      that post-war
	           gift-horse life

she barely made it through cutting open cans of soup
		                      with bare hands
	            and boiling noodles

until I was perfectly starved—
		                      how they unleashed campaigns
	           summers

to fatten me up as if I were a piece 
		                       of Europe
	            to be taken

and capitalized with love, American muscle.
		                     Boy child
	           doing best

Alpha dog walk. And so it was given,
		                    the path
	            silken.

Time-bomb brain in time-bomb body.
		                     Like that man
	           at the library

today—his twisted grievance spit
		                     at a dog
	         or at me walking by—

I couldn’t tell—it was a damn fine day—
		                    sun
	          with a little English on it curving

toward noon—earth in maintenance—
		                     perpetual—
	            low—

couples somewhere screwing themselves
		                       toward regret
	            again—

all that weird tangled power coaxed from pleasure
		                       and money
	         and fear of dying—earth dying

right before our eyes—beautiful human body
		                       as magnet
	          for harm—

for doing harm—when all I wanted was to save
		                     a shirt
	           I loved and not be called a pussy yet again

[cage] [piece] [with Wile E. Coyote in It and a River]

[here’s another bracket of time in which the spiritual might occur—a reverse
ecstasy—since I’m letting river frame the picture now //  me—a skin and bone shimmy 
shuffling that stop-time human ecstasy I see in poems all the time // river the chords 
but they’re gone // river oblivious // blink and the page of it refreshes //  or 
it’s me that is disappearing—a counter-flux—the river that was looking muttering 
Heraclitus downriver to some turtles basking on the stones // or maybe the river
is simply constant gaze—one long bleeding string of vision—horizontal to the light
I reflect—like the common house fly—part and part and part of me burning
like cathedral glass—while that other I  just wobbles on the riverbank like a cartoon
coyote bonked on the head—the acme—yep you heard that right—of me bathed
in sunlight—blue river running slow and lazy—embodied—sharing this brain // 
—O river are you ever truly lonesome you sound so country western some days
I have to ask before this song cycle fades and dopplers down an abyss of track
rebooting time I think—the sound of your leaving forever in my ear as I walk away]

[Poem in which I Consider the 38% of My DNA I Share with a Goose]

so this goose just hissed my way one of those
don’t tread

on me gun range kind of warnings
and so I

thought WhatTheFuck!—it’s the park!—
I’m just

walking—you can shit where you want—
munch

grass—I don’t care anymore—I don’t
have kids—

I try to keep the fecal count low
where

I live—but it hissed again and so
I went all

Kyrie—flipped the bird a bird—is this
animal

husbandry? Did I have dominion?
I imagine

eating them sometimes but then it’s
faux

graux again—the poor creatures force-
fed 

so their livers are buttery—the
process

gavage (I’ll let you make the rhyme)—
the taste

a delicacy—but how much stress
I don’t

know—I’ll have to ask Temple Grandin
for that—

for what I ingest or breathe in other-
wise

I’ll do that math—so many nightmares 
now

I know I am alive—now one maybe
with a goose

in it—or maybe the goose
is ex-

periencing night terror—they possess
brains

as we do—exhibit REM sleep—
I am

the one who haunts—there may be eggs
already

in wrecked grass just greening along
the river—

all those coils of likeness making bird
parts

in the yolk that need protecting—suns
out of which

bird-me rises—brain-me thinking is it
possible

in this doomed world to love a thing too much

DENNIS HINRICHSEN‘s most recent work is schema geometrica, winner of the Wishing Jewel Prize from Green Linden Press. His tenth collection, Flesh-plastique, will appear in 2023, also from Green Linden. He has new poems in The Cincinnati Review, Dunes Review, On the Seawall, and RHINO, and forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Posit and Witness.

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