The Glacier
Issue Three
Winter 2024
Aquarium Wedding
(reception)
Lights where the bride inside
slipped through sequins, a terrible dress.
This time’ll be different! I was trying to tell you.
Outside the window, five or six sparrows
listless in forsythia. Angle of a footpath
listless in a garden. I thought there’d be a band?
About England you were saying? Literature,
a dinner table, the silences
alongside roads in novels? Agreed,
but here is the tiger shark, here
the dolphin. Here their shadows
moving along the floor. Listen, I like
your tie, the movement your mouth makes
at the rim of your glass. Let’s get out of here.
I’ve got a rocket in my pocket.
The night is just now getting started.
“Formation of Metaphor Counteracts
the Atomization of Being”
So that the squeak, on a gym floor, of a sneaker
is opening a sticky window.
So that you girls like to party? is spring river
surged past riverbanks
and outside on the street, faces of crows
turned this direction
are rows of tomatoes, glass jars
my mother stocks in her cellar. So that everything
will get rich! Thicken with death. Upset,
my father can rock like a hobby horse,
a mechanical toy. Who was a wealth, intricate,
does not just
follow my mother around. Nightly calls out,
a flare, and across the way
lights of the development sit
at the surface. They keep
rolling forward, rolling back.
Dive
(at night)
When ten years’d turned out of hand, me/my sister
fell into a yard. The fuck was that? a neighbor said.
The house in the grass shone, opening to the eye.
Then I saw the moon’d jacked open the sky
and burned the outside world: it was all there,
at the surface, like an emptied swimming pool.
I saw the donut shop on Delaware Ave
looking dropped off in the rain, but the lights inside
blazing: drawn along by horses, awake
Kate Northrop’s recent collections are Homewrecker (New Letters vol 88, 2022) and cuntstruck (C & R Press, 2017). She teaches at the University of Wyoming.
Artwork from Creative Commons.
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