The Glacier
Issue Three
Winter 2024

Orionids

Another August came and passed and I had nothing to show for it. I filled out none of the requisite paperwork. The light began to shift, my window cling only casting color on the ceiling. My tin horses lost every miniature bottle from their tin cart. Months pass and I leave them splayed on the floor, front legs poised to step nowhere. The real horses vanished overnight as the construction crews appeared, new scaffolding blocking the view of the purple mountain. The mornings grew frosty. The fog came in, curling itself sleepily around the mountaintop like a dog. Each morning I watched the neighbor’s weenie dog piss in the apartment grass. Some nights, the dishwasher broken, I made myself angry with my hands in soapy water. The clouds lifted when they shouldn’t have. I went outside, cold and still a little mad. Five small stars huddled for warmth while I wore my rubber shoes. A single comet appeared and disappeared from the evening’s center and I couldn’t have told you what any of it meant.

Maggie Nipps is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Idaho, where she is the managing editor of Fugue. Her work appears in Peach Mag, mercury firs, Figure 1, Pinwheel, Sporklet, and elsewhere. She is the co-founder/co-editor of Afternoon Visitor, a new journal of poetry and hybrid text.

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