The Glacier
Issue Three
Winter 2024

Mercury Has No Moons

Mercury has no boundaries, either. Mercury rolled out of the cracked glass thermometer, across the pink floor: little gray pebbles that slipped through the pads of my fingers. My mother said mercury could kill me with its poison, then fed us fish every Friday, even so. I think I lost my virginity in a Mercury parked by the beach. Queen was popular back then. Years later, the actor who played Freddie Mercury in the biopic wore huge fake teeth. Of all the gods, I liked Mercury best. In D’Aulaires’ Book of Myths, he’s called “Hermes” and was smooth as a boy or a girl and as winged. He raped loved one woman only, turned her mother to stone. Yesterday, I bought a pair of gold clogs—with wings! Posted them on Instagram and went viral.

To Be Stevie Nicks Cool

So many men love my friend:
her boyfriend and both ex-husbands build her a three-season porch,
all cedarwood and teak. Pine needles from her backyard

cover the almost-floor. I tell her she is sexual,
like Stevie Nicks. People can smell it like golden beer. They smell my indifference—
it smells like a New England Timber Rattlesnake, all scales,

black-tinged-gold, like a hole. I learned today in a crossword
that Venus has no moons. That was the down clue,
What Venus lacks that Earth has: _ _ _ _ _:

five letters—O and O—filled in already. She sends me
a video of the three men and their equipment: saws, nails, drills,
hammers, planes, pulleys, rope,

planks of wood, aromatic as a closet, some tool
with claws on both ends they toss back and forth, way too hot.

Eddie Munster’s Doll

When I was a girl, I wanted Wolfie:

head of a werewolf, body of a boy,

soft white nightie, dark brown V widow’s peak

that matched Eddie’s. All the Munsters were kind.

My wanting went deep, went long, went feral.

Now, I plant lupines, stalked, purple flowers

tapered like spears and named for their hunger—

how they exhaust the warm, heavy soil.

I watched The Munsters for lunch: long hours,

hours, hungry for Eddie’s sweet Wolfie.

Jennifer Martelli has received fellowships from The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Poetry, Verse Daily, Plume, The Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree, as well as The Queen of Queens, which won the Italian American Studies Association Book Award and was shortlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award. Jennifer Martelli is co-poetry editor for MER. www.jennmartelli.com

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