The Glacier
Issue Three
Winter 2024

All My Life’s a Circle

In the streetlight 
a long and graveled shadow,
the thousand small moths
laying gauze over the moment,
yellow and blurry and blessed.
A friend of mine describes the flies
that circle a dog’s butthole,
and the other species of fly
that fly around the flies that circle
a dog’s butthole.
I forget the names
of flies and people and anuses,
the days and where they go.
Before the sun set,
gnats danced 
in a concentrated and wild ball
of nature. It was me,
and then them, and then somewhere
on the horizon, eternity.
What is chaos
but a poem from a distance?

Weed, Man

In the darkness she raged and cried out why?
to the cricket’s incessant song. Just then

sorrow fell quick like a star from the sky.
Remember: through grace, we are forgiven. 

Cornrows and summer with my brother, Ben,
we smoked grass out of a lug nut and stood

straight against an irrigation ditch, when,
out of nowhere, he vanished. How then should

a man spend two decades in guilt, and would
you believe in mercy, that it returns

like the prodigal daffodil? It could
all be as simple as surrender. Burns

bright the small light inside our body
until it leaves. We’ll be okay, won’t we?

Flannel

In the woods,
silence; stones 
cry out.

A creek
and a dog,
small congregation

of vultures.
“Where, Lord?”
they said to him.

This corpse
walks, lo, sings
to the leaves

a joyful song.
Everything falls
but makes room—

oh, absence—
for clouds. 
They flow

over sky, light
new warmth
worn clean.

Clay Matthews has published poetry in journals such as Image, Kenyon Review, Appalachian Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. His books are Superfecta (Ghost Road Press), RUNOFF (BlazeVox), Pretty, Rooster and Shore (both from Cooper Dillon), and Four-Way Lug Wrench (Main Street Rag Books). He currently lives in Elizabethtown, KY and teaches at Elizabethtown Community & Technical College.

BACK

ISSUE tHREE HOME