The Glacier
Issue Three
Winter 2024

TIMES SQUARE

I must have been reading a really good book
at Fourteenth Street, when I looked up 
and saw the express train had come and gone,  
though the next one was already here, 
and rushed me to Times Square so quickly 
that, while transferring to the shuttle, 
at the top of those wide shallow stairs 
suturing the subway lines together,
I gazed ahead and saw myself—the me 
that had caught the train I missed—and even 
felt the thrill of spotting someone familiar 
in a crowd, just from a glimpse of a shoulder 
wrapped in a thrifted maroon parka, just from 
the back of a head, filled with ruminations. 

For most of the days of my life, no one 
has known my whereabouts. If I died 
touring Paraguay, or in a midtown elevator, 
there wouldn’t have been anyone to notify. 
If I died in bed, I might have been a story 
you read in the Post, the body found stinking 
after how long? If I hit the trifecta 
at Aqueduct and gave it all to the first
panhandler I saw, who would ever know? 
An unwitnessed life is completely undramatic 
and outrageous. I spent the night cleaning 
every inch of my apartment. At dawn 
I walked to the hospital for surgery, 
past the public school where I once taught. 

I caught up to the slightly-in-the-future 
me, on the shuttle platform, leaning 
against an I beam. I beheld her posture, 
her demeanor, her perfect height, her skirt 
falling just above her boots, affording 
a glimpse of sheer black tights. I’m beginning 
to understand why so many trans women 
take one another for lovers—half because 
no one else will, half because no one 
else can. Our beauty is laced with grief, 
our furious love could burn this city down.
Then I rejoined myself, got behind my eyes, 
filled my boots and gripped the hand that holds 
the book I read while waiting for the train.

THE WARM DARK

When my mother let me know 
she didn’t want me 

I was tiny enough 
to remember the warm dark. 

I wanted to go back there 
but I was already here—

so I’d have to take the long way,
through this terrible life.

THE WAY WE WERE

Northport High School Tigers Marching Band, 1980

I resided in a sea of clarinets, behind the girls 
(mostly) in the flute and piccolo ranks, right 
of the boys (mostly) in the trombone section, 
left of the saxophones, who were folded in 
with the trumpets and cornets, in front of 
the drums, flanked by bells and backed 
by thirteen great white Sousaphones. 
All of us were strapped into cartoonishly high hats—
“Q-tips” we called them—which threatened 
to choke us or tip us over in the wind, and 
thick uniform coats with nothing underneath 
but our adolescent bodies with their various secretions 
and thatches of new hair or crescendoing breasts, 
patches of acne, eczema, stashes of pot 
in sewn-in pouches. Yet, buttoned up and seen 
from a distance, we were more or less identical, 
stepping high, rearing back and pivoting 
while blasting rough approximations of 
Earth, Wind & Fire or The Doobie Brothers
or standing in place for “The Way We Were.” 
Sharp or flat didn’t matter, just volume, 
blowing for dear life. (Mitchell Bonano 
became a living legend for blowing his braces 
into his Flugelhorn). We played not for 
the incompetent football team, who could 
barely move in their own stuffed uniforms, 
not for the crowd, whom we outnumbered, 
certainly not for Mr. Pansler, silly little man 
flailing his arms on a stepladder at the 50-yard line, 
or perched atop the bleachers at weekday practice 
like a traffic cop with that fucking megaphone. 
One day the wind up there started to unravel 
his whole hair situation—a source of endless 
puzzlement to us—the hair, or whatever 
it was, unfurling sideways like a flap of steel wool 
out past his shoulder. “Yeah I know, I know,” 
he said into the megaphone, “ha ha, very funny,” 
and it was very funny, really an amazing sight 
on a chilly fall day, otherwise dull, except for the tight 
blue-jean asses of the flag girls (and one boy) out front. 
Only God knows who we were playing for, or how 
we were conscripted into this bizarre outfit. 
The biggest mystery by far: our dedication—
315 of us weaving our ranks with precision 
(eight paces to every five yards), arranging ourselves 
into a rose, which morphed into Louis 
Armstrong’s profile, then a map of the U.S. 
minus Alaska and Hawaii, and finally one big “N” 
40 yards across and floating sideways like a cloud 
over the field. None of us got to see it 
because we were it, though from high above 
people said we were magnificent.

Diana Goetsch has published several collections of poems, along with the acclaimed memoir This Body I Wore (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022). Her work has appeared in many leading magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Poetry, Best American Poetry and the Pushcart Prize anthology. She resides in New York City, where she taught English at Stuyvesant High School, was the Grace Paley Teaching Fellow at The New School, and now writes and teaches on a freelance basis. Her website is www.dianagoetsch.com.

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