The Glacier
Issue Three
Winter 2024

Gorilla,

it has been a stressful week. Gorilla,
I do not want to transcribe meeting notes.
I want only soft foods. My jaw hurts when
I chew, goddamn gorilla. 

A stranger overheard a conversation 
with my brother about insomnia and she told me
I should eat more bananas. I hate bananas.
I hate lying in bed for five hours awake
but bananas are not worth it. I suck at gorilla.

When I was a child, I had a recurring nightmare 
about you. Sometimes my family would escape 
from your gorilla barn by wading through quicksand 
to our car and then speed away.

I can also remember your frustration: 
a little blue Toyota shredding the dirt
road into dust like nobody’s gorilla.

Gorilla, I could climb into your museum
skin and drag my knuckles. show all my teeth
in a power move, but instead,
after I take a deep inhale, I exhale gorilla.

In moments of heavy traffic, I have learned 
how to count my breath as 
three gorillas in, three gorillas out: 

Gorilla, gorilla, gorilla.

Applied Mathematics

You’ve put your clothes back on and become quiet,
as if I did something wrong. Love, once multiplied 
by the power of two, is now just a discreet view 
of your stomach as it’s curtained beneath his shirt. 

My mother winds wool around a common knot, crossing threads 
over and over like the math we make of grief. Grief, the study 
of change, what we once loved in physical form, the calculus of none.
My father’s ashes, heavier than stone. She does not want them.

And what are the absolutes of love? Why do we incrementally 
fade from one another? One day becomes ten months, then
it’s years since I’ve seen you. When you say, “It’s like nothing
has changed,” I remember the memory of us
sharing the same bench in the park, drunk and singing.

Consider the measurements of a bench, the eroding bolts,
and how long it will last before it breaks under the weight
of an unknowing person. Consider my body falling to the ground,
then picking itself up and pushing through the day without you.

Precise Coordinates

Late afternoon. The gauzy curtains 
bandage the window. I stretch 

my one mobile leg from bed. 
Buckley, my dog who died four years ago, 

sits framed on my dresser, looking at me 
from his professional headshot. When we 

arrived at the photo studio that day, 
the room was alive with the sound 

of Chihuahuas squeaking from 
their little brains. Still, I couldn’t console 

his worry. Looking back at me now, 
he still looks concerned and I’ll take it.

Somewhere beneath the surgical
dressing is my new knee. 

Any movement feels as if I’m breaking open 
the wound again and again, and I need 

to map it, the precise coordinates of my pain. 
My entire body wants to curl up and lick itself, 

like a dog. They say I should be walking within 
a few weeks. I walked Buckley into the clinic 

that laid him on the floor to die. Running
barefoot along the Pacific with him, 

leaping over the waves. Now, waves of pain pin 
my leg to the bed. Heavy and swollen, 

the image of my dog softening as the light goes,
his fur still threaded through my old sweater.

Leaving South of Market

Industrial lamps drench the dancefloor with diffused light. 
Glow sticks threading her fingers, a dancer hula-hoops 
the room. Here, everything is almost like you remember, 

every flash pulsing in time to the beat. The guy you’ve 
been flirting with moves your hand over his pants and you, 
too old for this shit, get up and pull your vintage velvet 

duster from the floor. At the exit, two big dudes in security 
vests wave you outside after one stamps your hand, the ink 
fracturing into the lines of your wrist in the rain. Nearby, 

someone in a Santa suit flicks a cigarette and soon, the two 
of you are laughing while exhaling rings of smoke, ho, ho, ho 
into the low fog. But you are too old for cigarettes, too old 

for Santa. Sausages and peppers marinate the air. 1:13 a.m. 
Police shovel tents into a dump truck. Someone’s set a heap 
of garbage on fire. The fog swallows the smoke, the sound 

of rain and fire engines. Ambulances pierce the stoplights 
towards the highway onramp. In the cab, your driver 
grumbles about crossing the bridge and now you’re 

calculating distance by the number of exits and freeways, 
not footsteps or city blocks. The broken streetlamp outside 
your building flashes like disco strobe. You rush to 

the bathroom for your first pee in hours, peel your fake 
eyelashes into the sink, scrub the glitter from your face. 
The small hours of morning open like a sinkhole. The moon 

fights for her moment from behind the clouds. A large 
mosquito throws itself upon the porch lamp, bumping 
against the glass as if it could become the light.

Tracey Knapp lives in the California Bay Area. Her first collection of poems, Mouth, won the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award and was published in 2015. Tracey has received scholarships from Tin House Writers’ Workshop, La Romita School of the Art in Terni, Italy, and The Dorothy Sargent Poetry Fund. Recent work appears in Cream City Review, The Pinch, New Ohio Review, Five Points, The Shore and elsewhere. Find her at traceyknapp.com

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