The Glacier
Issue Three
Winter 2024

Senior Year

I told Coach I’d not be writing JV ballgame stories
for the local paper anymore, next
I was perpetually driving home stoned
a mist over the streets, all school year it was 42 degrees

Once headed through town at dusk a cop 
rolled down his window, yelled “turn your lights on!” 
and I did, anxious sack of grass in my hip pocket
a dirty dork in a blue Escort we called The Big Blue Shit

Not much of a rebel, the first time I drank
Jack Daniels punch at a party I got all loosey-goosey 
in my limbs and someone who played at handling 
his liquor better made me sit down like it was kindergarten

Stoned in the backseat of an overfull, disintegrating car
cracking jokes at the hot girl in the front, she said
“is he always like this?” and I took it as a compliment
I was pretty in love with myself and pretty embarrassed
at who I was, all at once, and everything seemed

To happen in cars: The cute girl who kissed me over the gearshift
of the Escort, in the back of a duct-taped sportscar with Eric the Annoying
his buddy almost drove us through a guardrail on a county road
into a bog but I wasn’t nervous – I was drunk,

Happy. I didn’t have the sense to understand
even then we tempted death. I had almost no girlfriends.
Everything pulsed and ached. If it felt good I did it because
our English teacher told us that was the way the 60s worked
and I assumed that he recommended it. I remember

Telling a friend I idolized and had the hots for that I wish
I didn’t have a sex drive – I meant it in part and in part I
was trying to impress her. Desire was so bourgeois.
None of my heroes held jobs. There was so much ahead of me

Then: psychedelic drug use. Psych ward disintegration. The fear 
that’s never left. One day I drove my mother home from something
it was like she expected me to swerve into oncoming traffic,
she was working the imaginary brake pedal from the passenger
seat like she was teaching drivers ed. But all through high school,

and especially once we finished week one of that senior year, 
I don’t think I ever honestly told myself I wanted to be dead.

Single Parent

There’s a big fuss over soccer camp
whether or not he’ll go today.
That he is the worst player at soccer camp.
That there’s no one his age at soccer camp.
That there’s a five year old who is a better player
than he, embarrassing him at soccer camp.

There is much hem and haw over is he
going or is he not.

We pass the gas station where we’d get the Gatorade.
He doesn’t know yet.
We stop at the old Owen’s grocery where the Gatorade
is cheaper. He guesses he’ll go.
He’ll stay in the car. Don’t get him red
or blue or white. Orange is okay.

A few more blocks to the high school soccer fields.
We’re early. Would you like me to sit here with you
in the dadwagon and wait? Okay.

But as soon as two minivans pull up he says, Okay
Dad, I’m going, and now he’s shutting the door
behind him and looking ahead to the fields
as I reach for him, calling into the closed window
are you sure you’re going to be okay?

Synchronicity

for my sister

On the writing side of Dave’s postcard 
from an alternate universe Dave writes
“my new gf smells like Arby’s”
& I flip it over to the picture side
after using it as a bookmark for an entire
chapbook and probably a book or two
before that & it appears Dave has photocopied
the Robert Doisneau photo of a kissing couple
in Paris that my sister once  hung
in her bedroom after our dad’s death because
the man to the left of the couple, striding
to some unknown destination and oblivious
to his own memorialization in the annals
of famous photography looks like our dad
& how can I explain that noticing this
makes me feel a feeling I’ve not felt at all
this past year, perhaps back even further
that God is really looking out for us
whatever God is and wherever we’re headed
that we are loved by the Universe without
earning or deserving it, humans, our biological
existence even relying on the serendipitious
happenstance of the primordial soup and
the many vectored reasons our fathers
found opportunity to ejaculate into our mothers
& now I’m thinking of how many things
had to break this way and not that &
that way and not this in 1999 for me
to have these 24 more years behind me
of mornings and mourning, heartbreak
and comfort, it’s a miracle I haven’t 
yet learned to appreciate sufficiently
but I’m trying, Jesus. . . Mary 
& Joseph, sis, I’m trying as best I can.

Steve Henn wrote American Male, Guilty Prayer, Indiana Noble Sad Man of the Year, and two previous collections. He continues to teach high school English in northern Indiana. More at therealstevehenn.com.

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