The Glacier
Issue Three
Winter 2024

Disambiguation With Ballpoint Pen and Lionheart

I thread whichever Bic ballpoint 
I’m using through a Christmas tree tag 
in hopes that the white tail helps me 
find the pen when I inevitably lose 
it in the couch cushions
or the space between 
the coffee maker and fridge,
in hopes the hypervisibility 
of the implement might preserve
certain ostensive thoughts
that occupy my days in monologue,
making them physical before they dissipate.
The time I spend pacing the house
in search of it is marked in strophe rain
pouring down a mansard roof as
I invent the view out of this window.
I find the pen in a pile of clothes
on the pool table in the basement.
I rattle the tree tag and watch
the white tail bounce 
like a phosphene through the darkness 
of a closed eye, a bounding deer
in woods of antistrophe. Then I pace 
the house once more searching 
for my copy of Louis Zukofsky’s A
and the canto about Coeur de Lion,
the Lionheart, I want to annotate.
For what was spent on the ransom
of a kidnapped king, for what was spent 
on his castle above the Seine, for what was spent 
on Byzantine blood… It’s left for you 
to fill in, elliptical as a king’s kidnapping,
fungible as his expatriate death or money,
gangrenous as an arrow-struck limb.
But there’s an epode in what we find 
to lose again, forgiveness in that tale too, 
as the boy-archer, the regicide walks free.

Cal Freeman (he/him) is the music editor of The Museum of Americana: A Literary Review and author of the books Fight Songs (Eyewear 2017) and Poolside at the Dearborn Inn (R&R Press 2022). His writing has appeared in many journals including Atticus Review, Image, The Poetry Review, Verse Daily, Under a Warm Green Linden, North American Review, The Moth, Oxford American, River Styx, and Advanced Leisure. He is a recipient of the Devine Poetry Fellowship (judged by Terrance Hayes), winner of Passages North’s Neutrino Prize, and a finalist for the River Styx International Poetry Prize. Born and raised in Detroit, he teaches at Oakland University and serves as Writer-In-Residence with InsideOut Literary Arts Detroit. His chapbook of poems, Yelping the Tegmine, has just been released.

BACK

ISSUE tHREE HOME