The Glacier
Issue Three
Winter 2024

Your Day Will Come

On a beach with a metal detector. Surrounded 
with amorous cicadas. Saying “Tonight we dine 
on the blood of our enemies.” Spinning straw into 
the employee of the month award. You were Everest, 
and I was the Isle of Wight, and this was a remake of Love Story. 
The choir sure makes war sound beautiful. 
I woke up this morning and suddenly had it all together. 
JK. I was just there for the vibes. You were one of those 
hammer-plus-tools gadgets one gets as a gift 
and then puts in a kitchen drawer and forgets about, 
and I was a Philistine, and this was a remake of The Notebook, 
which I’ve never seen, but I get the impression 
there’s a lot of rain and desperate, doomed kissing, 
which feels about right for the wire you broke in my brain. 

The argument isn’t convincing. Most aren’t. Maybe 
none are. Perhaps persuasion isn’t the goal. Dreaming 
of electricity late into the night in 1832, then dropping 
some wedding gift on a beach someone finds 
hundreds of years later. Lovers are at a drive-in 
pretending it’s 1954. Ah, daddy-o. And everywhere 
I go, wrapped in balloons. Wherever you stand, 
the universe is a completely different thing, 
and always the same thing. A flock of geese in a flying V 
far up helps me in that way. You were St. Jude 
and I was a chunk of glass broken from the lens 
of the university telescope, and this was lightning 
in a bottle. It all felt so new. Some first thing. Imagine 
constantly being born. That would be rough on everyone.

The Invisible Things

Throughout our failed romance, the invisible will continue 
to hide the visible. We will love each other for it, 
the way time stops at the speed of light. 
I don’t know what it means that time stops 
at the speed of light, because there’s no knowing it 
from the inside. It’s all something we watch. 
Its lyrical content concerns a failed romance 
and explores a narrator processing the fallout 
and its aftermath, in the way math class is over 
and now I’m just sitting here looking at my grades 
the rest of my life. The long slow credits 
or the speeded-up credits for the network replay. 
The survey says I’ll live seventeen more years. 
So now I’m looking for a second opinion. 

And we’ll hate ourselves for it. Because it’s like voting 
or flipping a light switch. Someone has to clean 
the place. Continue to water the plants. 
Contemplate a life in the arts. Follow the trail 
of marshmallows along the ledge where 
I’ve decided the rest of my life is best spent 
working on a series of soliloquies on how much I love 
certain flavors of chewing gum 
to the point of distraction, which is a beautiful 
phrase, like “million-dollar view.” What does a million 
dollar view go for these days? I can almost see it. 
When I was in first grade, our next-door neighbors’ 
two-year-old drowned in their swimming pool 
and I’ve been living in this world ever since.

Let’s Make a Deal

Here come the jets to make sure we don’t forget 
this isn’t 1882. Here come the dripping leaves. 
And a praying mantis on the screen door. What the fuck 
is that? I mean, I know what it is. But still. 
It’s one of two special characteristics I have, to turn 
and then turn back, and wonder if this is real. 
OK, it’s real. But is it real real, or real, the way 
one gifts one’s body to another, thinking it’s love 
when it’s really just late on a Friday, high 
on superlatives and unfinished projects. Don’t try 
to hold onto the first place ribbon from the doubles 
sack race where you met, or whatever, go ahead 
and hold onto it. It’s nice to have things around the house 
that let others know we exist and like things. 

Here comes a dog across the yard. Actually, it’s a fox. 
Well, that’s new. Or not really. But it’s “hey, check it out, 
a fox just went across the yard” new, which isn’t a shock, 
but still, low on the statistical probability scale, 
like checking the mail every day, and one day getting 
an actual letter, written in cursive, even. I pretend 
I’m two people, so that one can shatter 
and the other can go to work. So that one 
can stay at the sack race, laughing in the grass, 
and the other can be half of the fight all the way home. 
But we’re golden in dappled sunlight! I understand 
what’s going on when we get back together, so let’s 
wait just a little longer before we get together. 
Let’s make a concerted effort to ignore the signs.

John Gallaher’s most recent book is My Life in Brutalist Architecture (Four Way Books 24). Gallaher co-edits The Laurel Review and lives in northwest Missouri.

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