The Glacier
Issue Three
Winter 2024

Dis-Content Creator

“Come drop your robe of rays 
and towel clouds, your shiny birds. 
Fix down gently in this megacity 
covered with night and concrete 
pour rinsing island rock forever, 
amen! I cannot look away 
from your bright face, moon boy…”

It means four hundred 
dollars, in this economy billionaires 
kill for that much Paul is told 
about why he’s not destined to be 
close, can’t even be persuaded to travel 
to Brooklyn to pick-up money that’s for 
him. The moon Nasdaq-bright 
tonight is a simplifying sign


above cloud-scroll and stars 
tickering across Times 
Square in advance of dinner
darkness and then morning. 
Paul dances a jig, accepting 
his call from a friend who proffers
in the sung Kingston speech 
of a Brooklyn plant-daddy:

“Come, sun, home, here!” 

Paul’s blasting cold white 
cream all over a face so beautiful,
men all over the world input 
embossed digit strings enough 
to buy him sweaters, 
assorted weekend jaunts, his nice
clothes for the gym, briefs
designed by geniuses.

*

Paul scrambles from West 106th 
on the felt pool table of his apartment,
where he spends the internet chasing 
numbers in weeks down holes to come 
out the same break as before, his tables 
empty of wealth of everything except scratches 
and the next game.
His chest chalked full of feeling 
this game of living like a quality human. 
Ask any HBO white-collar felon — 
if they’re not risking wanted, they’re wanting 
and still wanting. And yet, you must want 
to be happy, ponders Paul, and if you are happy 
you don’t want for nothing. 

*

In this bachelor city Paul stares at coins or backs 
of heads, steaming on the street. He’s offered free meals 
and favors put to him to decline. From clamorous manholes 
choir smokers stinking sending smoke signals above 
Broadway. 

Fingering off shoeboxes of lights. Bearing 
professional flesh. Cool maladjustment 
of pity and done being vaguely magical 
about numbers. 

“I have seen things, friend, elephants parading down 
Ninth Avenue, pigeons raising hands in air look like 
flapping hands in air that hold whatever grace they can, 
places far from here to dream of. Pigeons aren’t real, 
nothing is real. Nor the sound of a husband drawing hot
bathwater. Hands tied down to just one or two. 
At trail end, my tubes will be replaced, my shoes 
take off, swatting the air, tired in front of them 
will fly like fists looking for torn bread braided 
at the laces of good bird mothers.”

“Are you okay?”

Whiteheads and skinheads sit ahead of Paul on the C
by a sunflower family once thick shrunk against 
metal, black seed faces pinging hollow against impregnable 
norament in postures of total wilt, exaggerated abandonation, 
under advertisements for Tinder, OKCupid and Shein,
yellow husks spiraling down in Fibonacci numbers. 

*

Paul swings a metal slugger for the fence, never missing 
in the kitchen, up cooking late night 	plans and planting 
seed in April for the later reaping. One young grasshopper 
holding rent money, gas, and electric. Oiled hairs. 
Working honestly at his métier.

His main chance, superiority in arms. Glamorously Afro 
American.

Paul goes to walk fast old road to see his cool 
Jamaican friend who will be wrapped in a green chenille 
blanket and a couch for it. Oranges he would like 
to eat. Matching socks to hang and wear out in light 
gray harmony. Good with rainbows and arrows.  

“Where have you been all this time?”

*

Paul pulls focus sitting at the power café. 
Surrounded by the scent of crushed flowers, Muji oil diffuser, 
pressed under a vape spread out in blueberry blue and verdant
lights, lost in the deep dank of sex and flora.

“Stay blessed, brother! Alive is as blessed as I’ll ever be. 
  You?”

Everyone’s a Building Burning

Walking the trail of breadcrumbs
to the first day on board. I remember 
hours unpacked and threw on 
to the bed. Days opened like dogs 
let loose in a cargo hold. 
Stacking words on the couch, 
ending on the floor. Without warning, 
finding feet in soil with petals for words, 
planted in the sand with crabgrass 
and broken fences as teeth. I hid 
my wedding ring in my asshole.
I’m sorry for all the men who found it. 
I pray for the dog in the cargo room. 
For the boys lost in flames folding into the sea, 
folding into smoke, folding into night. 
If the light that you shine can be seen, show it then.

Kami Enzie is a Vienna-born, New Orleans–raised queer Black writer. Work appears in Chicago Review, Common Place, Oversound, and The Poetry Review. He is an alumnus of Tin House Winter Workshops, Vermont College of Fine Art’s Postgraduate Writers’ Conference, and a 2023 graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. IG/BS/X: @yungwerther

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