The Glacier
Issue Two
Winter 2023

OBSESSION

Girl don’t think it
Tardive dyskinesia; tardive dyskinesia
Calendar calendar calendar calendar
Tardive dyskinesia
Synesthesia I think blue I think shades of blue
Girl stop he doesn’t want you
Got onna plane
Got onna plane
Girl stop
Look up at the calendar don’t think calendar
Don’t think it
Maybe the therapist says maybe think maybe
Maybe everything will break and ruin
Maybe it won’t he says
So what if you’re not perfect so what
Everything doesn’t have to be so yes or no
Yes I think that’s true
Say the longest word you can
Say the longest most escape you can’t stop
The most always the most right I think of it
So many shades of blue
Citrus blues
Citrus is a vibe in every sense
A perfect blue sense
The sky collapsing until I’m outside of it
Think how big the universe is
The longest biggest sky until it’s not sky
And it’s not so black and white is it
It’s not so right
What if everything does blow up
It’s blowing up anyway everywhere infinite
And that’s not a bad thing
Dark dark blue
Don’t get so stuck on that

On you

TINSEL, PHONEBOOTH, TORSO

A woman named Lisa taunts 
Bolaño through the telephone
Inside the booth where he experiences 
The experience of the misery of love

She is happy, or at least fucking someone
Wildly and new 

Few shining things are without such pain
Here we go dressed up in shreds of aluminum
While we wither too

Now here all of the mosquitoes are gone 
The last of them fasted through Autumn
And died hungry for blood 

It’s cold
A parking meter breaks and everyone 
On the block wants the spot next to the oak 
And the squirrels have been disturbed from
Retrieving their petty acorns

I’m obsessed with what to save

And I am lost and suffering driving 
Three four blocks over for anywhere to 
Land would be a reprieve 
Even all the way on the boulevard where 

It’s the holidays again everyone is lost
For something to celebrate for some yearning
For a thing they lost ago ago 
Or never held long enough 
To wrap up and gaze on and tear apart
It’s just—should I call you? It’s been years
And my petty routine is fine

I’ve got a deep deep wanting for a thing
In my visions it’s bright but unclear 
A fuzzy halo around the streetlights in my left eye 
They scanned my brain but didn’t find any masses
And then my throat and chest 
And used a knife and left 

A tiny shiny shred of titanium to find and check on later 
Take this mere tinsel our fabrication of light
For which we dress up painful withering trees 

The city government 
Has put up enormous lighted snowflakes 
And all the telephone polls are heralding 
Though we are loveless some light

The doctors say 
It’s stress and I must leave New York 
Go away 
I want you
Change my life

ARCHAI

There there, 
there are many outdated theories 

on the origin of the universe and
not as many for what happens later
except we all suspect everything 
is stretching from itself and from what
is not itself

Where are the boundaries of my body?

Science is willing to hold these
contradictions in the palms of a great
god who is too busy on the internet
of all things gravity and light 
to get lost in an essential logical underlay 

Where there are rules there are broken
people breaking them

Where there are endings there is
a vast interconnection making that
impossible

There is inevitably the aether or some
other explanation

The firmament for a bedroom for the stars 

A filament that is too thin
to divide the human
from divine 
Though we try

ANIMAL NEEDS

one two four ate
sexy crumble blue

berry cake moaning
song from the gut

we don't love each
other anymore do

we we don't we got
dessert but it was

too late the kitchen
is closed folks

stop your being
hungry and every

fucking need we got
in us fucking needs

beliefs and the urge
for babies the porch 

swings and experiences
maybe the occasional

sweat and gasp in bed
who doesn't want it

whose own body won't
go in when it's cold

BORN AGAIN

	April is firing at me from my window.
	 
	And below   
	                            Eula is stomping
	                            her brand new feet.
	 
	You know you can open almost anything? Vowels,
	and hostility and mouths and seasons and holy texts.
	
	In Eula's first life,                                 cocaine
	                                                                 beat
	where Jesus passes now.
	 
	 
	I know my verse is one exposed Venus against a very large Spring,
	but it's the the slow open of everything, even my window,
	that has Spring itself acting like a lyric, a soft soprano, a lonely foot.
	   
	And now, Eula says they sing for you.  And I think she means
	these breaching seasons, where the walls of South Street
	keep her preaching only to me;
	 
	Even Spring, in all its bigness, is lonely and wants a lullaby.
	And this end and change is a kind of boredom. A boredom so violent
it is a black flower opening only part-way.

DANA JAYE CADMAN is Director of Creative Writing and Assistant Professor at Pace University Pleasantville. Her manuscript ARMAMENTS was a finalist in the 2021 Jake Adam York Prize, Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, and Georgia Poetry Prize, and longlisted for the Metatron Prize for Rising Authors. Her work has appeared in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day on poets.org, in New England Review, PRISM, Raleigh Review, North American Review, and elsewhere.

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