The Glacier
Issue Three
Winter 2024

Ruddy


Guilt awash in the drawer, coins from a different time and place, dull caked metal. Not only is there no use in crying, it can take decades, if one has them, to believe, in fact, milk spilled. Can grownups step outside these days without thanks for no sirens, guns? My guilt cake’s layered high, an apt metaphor given the cliché of the hidden woman in pop-out cakes. But let’s return to those obsolete coins, good-for-nothing except collecting. Their whatness, nouns. Like the Nazi hat sitting on a man’s lap in the plane seat beside a woman; the hat wrapped in clear cellophane. “A German military hat from the 40’s,” he answers when she asks. “You mean a Nazi hat.” Off the plane, she begs for something to cleanse her, to which another man replies, “It’s a thing, just a thing, from the past. It has no meaning now.”

Shira Dentz is the author of five books including Sisyphusina (PANK Books), winner of the Eugene Paul Nassar Prize 2021), and two chapbooks including Flounders (Essay Press). Her writing appears in many venues including Poetry, American Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, jubilat, Pleiades, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Idaho Review, New American Writing, Diagram, Brooklyn Rail, Lana Turner, Apartment, Nat Brut, Poets.org, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Poetrysociety.org, and NPR, and she’s a recipient of awards including an Academy of American Poets Prize and Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poem and Cecil Hemley Awards. More about her writing can be found shiradentz.com

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