The Glacier
Issue Three
Winter 2024

The floating city

I cleaned the kitchen 
I cleared all the dolphins 
out of your way 
I gardened which is to 
say I planted several 
things of which I have 
the tiniest memories of 
when there are trees 
again we will be living 
in floating cities held 
aloft by helium balloons 
I can see it in my 
mind’s eye as clearly as 
I can see twenty or 
thirty thousand ants 
with wings the color of 
broken glass carrying 
away the body of a dead 
or otherwise defunct 
astronaut I can see your 
outline in the window 
I am the shadow 
behind the blue car

Fuck the man who invented the electric chair

I’ve been taking a lot of things seriously 
lately like eating halvah in the moonlight 
and reconciling with my lost daughters 
I put the camping chairs out and poured 
everyone a dollop of butane and a dollop 
of propane I said this is how it works 
now—we’re all going to kill each other 
with kindness I mixed everyone an old 
fashioned from a book about the man 
who invented the electric chair and one 
of you said there’s no cigarette like the last 
cigarette and we each put a square of 
preserved lemon on our tongues and cried

My doppelganger dreams a centaur

two blue shirts hang 

on the back of my chair 

both bedevil me 

these days I lick my finger and 

put it into a well of salt 

it is how I become the deer

Bryan D. Price is the author of A Plea for Secular Gods: Elegies (What Books, 2023) His stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Noon Annual, Chicago Quarterly Review, Posit, Boulevard, and elsewhere. He lives in San Diego, California..

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