The Glacier
Issue Three
Winter 2024

Bridge

Before, when we struggled to have a child, that possible toddler haunted me, running across any room to clutch my knees.  I never saw his face, but his ghost embrace ached.  I didn’t picture him at twenty, impulsive and confused and living in the Upper Peninsula, letters migrating between us.  Now, we write about the price of gas, or maple leaves turning to flame, or the weather, and when it might change…

…and I crave that ghost embrace

Fan Letter

Dear Z, Didn’t your editor ever ask you to count the number of times certain words appear in your work?  This question broke the surface of my dream.  I know I personally overuse pearly, heart, and sky.  And true, I skipped around in your book, so maybe it was my fault dead, death, and blood accrued exponentially within a few pages.  It wouldn't kill me to cut you some slack.  Still, isn’t it nice to hear from a reader?  Maybe your point is accessing the existential through concrete imagery, but daily life feels precarious enough.  So shut the book, you might say, no one’s holding a gun to your head.  Watch a boxelder bug hobble across your windowpane, or the clouds repeat their muscled gray layers all the way to the horizon.  My mind chases mechanical rabbits, gnaws bones to splinters, ties itself in knots.  I had hoped for relief, so it hurts to give up how perfect we could have been together.

Kathleen McGookey has published several books and chapbooks of prose poems, most recently Cloud Reports (Celery City Chapbooks). Her book Paper Sky is forthcoming from Press 53 in October 2024. Her poems have appeared lately in Copper Nickel, Epoch, Field, Los Angeles Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and Willow Springs.

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