The Glacier
Issue Three
Winter 2024

STAY ON THE SCENE

In the only dream you’ve ever had 
that had a beginning, a middle, 
and an end, a dream soon to be smeared
into disappearance, you were granted 
three wishes, and your third wish 
was for your head to be—to really be—
a sweet and seedless orange.

*

No world, but then 
that corner window, morning, 
not all made up in a head;
no body, and then 
its apparatus accepts
the knowing feeling 
of there being another day.

*

Another orange you bought 
the other day is changing—
it’s its own unfinished painting, 
like one you might try, 
like a head or a fist,
on various walls.

*

Rise, as usual, like a stump, 
sleep still lapping at your skull,
and think of a pachyderm, think twice 
before you lecture your lover,
and never imagine every word 
you could have said tattooed on you.

*

Get on up, you, who shan’t 
mistake thyself for Little Susie,
oh my darling clementine,
my double, my dude!

CIVILIZATION

You don’t know what you would or wouldn’t do
were you, not you, to fall in love with some-

one or some two in a book, and what then?
A parching tongue?  Some pantomime?  More never?

Half of the base of the glass you just set down—
let’s call it half full—is off the table.

It’s still too soon to have to sweat this, be better;
you’re used to having nerves and filtered water, skyscrapers.

GOOSE CHASE

In Barn, Southampton, 1968, 
it’s as if Ellsworth Kelly
has asked each grass tip to point 
a different way, but it’s his sketch 
of a grapefruit that gets you,
the most elegant thing you know; 
that, or his photograph 
of leaves seen from below,
and stems, the sky behind 
like fleece, that seem to leap 
from a Carroll Dunham piece,
the future, where they’re teeth.

Graham Foust lives in Colorado and works at the University of Denver. His latest books are Terminations (Flood Editions, 2023) and Uncollected Later Poems (1968-1979) (Wave Books, 2023), a co-translation with Samuel Frederick of poems by the late German poet Ernst Meister.

BACK

ISSUE tHREE HOME