The Glacier
Issue Three
Winter 2024

Mother Fox

mother fox, you unbutton the belly of a hare 
in a rapeseed field, 
the belly with leverets inside 
listless as laundry folded by careful hands,

and stand in hunger-glitched brightness, 
and warn: 

I wish you such hunger the moon will seem an onion, 
ore in your belly, 
a wing grown inward, a mildewed ribcage. 

then lapwings heave into view growing into small suns.  

*

I smell the carcass of a seal pup by the shore 
unraveled by seagulls and crows. 
the sea is not cruel. their beaks are not cruel. 

no cruelty in the mother fox
whose love gently 
then fiercely gnaws. a child 

may be an anthem of silt and wound. 
a mother’s flesh hardens into her son’s 
breastplate. 
she pelts her skin 

for her daughter's winter.

*

often I see you
at dusk 
where I stumble into the hazel 
of your one eye, and the blue of the other, blind. 

a bird perches on a skull. 
mother, I am your cursed city; you are a knot of dark devotions.

Triin Paja lives in rural Estonia. She is the author of three collections of poetry in Estonian and a recipient of the Värske Rõhk Poetry Award, the Betti Alver Literary Award, and the Juhan Liiv Prize for Poetry. Her English poetry has received two Pushcart Prizes and her chapbook, Sleeping in a Field (forthcoming in 2024), won the Wolfson Poetry Chapbook Prize. Her poetry has been translated into Czech, Finnish, Russian, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Slovenian, and she is a member of the Estonian Writers’ Union.

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