The Glacier
Issue Two
Winter 2023

Andre Breton’s World War I Ambulance, 1914

Andre says if my driver seat appears unprotected, it is because it steers itself. Andre says if my Red

Cross is painted half black, I am just a hearse. Andre says Capitaine corpses believe they still ride horses.

Otherwise, my long truck is back-filled with non-cancerous Chloroform, balusters of salt, Schnapps,

gauze enough to wrap two giraffes. Carbolic lotion tubs. Andre says honey, many mistake my salve for

mayonnaise, yet too many ears go detached, stay underground. Andre says if my wheels appear old,

think ancient. They are secondhand scrap chariots via Hippodrome of Constantinople.

Lou Diamond Phillips, 1988

The only star not overacting in Young Guns.
The singular reason I knew any version of Ritchie Valens,
or what a calculus teacher can do inspired by a cholo gangster.

Trapezium, Parallelogram, Rectangle, Square, and Kite.
Bi-racial me failed to jam as cool a quadrilateral in the middle of my name.

Eponym for Master Gunnery Sergeant Leland “Lou” who as Wikipedia goes:
endured Guadalcanal, suffered physical ailment, ordered against will
to New Hebrides then New Zealand hospital, supply tripped to New Caledonia
where someone told him go back to Guadalcanal and when he arrived found
1st Marine Division moved to Australia (1500 miles away) so without orders
by train by ship by plane by choice to rejoin the others he hitchhiked.

JEFFREY HECKER is author of Rumble Seat (San Francisco Bay Press, 2011) & chapbooks Hornbook (Horse Less Press, 2012), Instructions for the Orgy (Sunnyoutside Press, 2013) & Ark Aft (The Magnificent Field, 2020). Recent work appears in South Dakota Review, Yalobusha Review, and Posit. A fourth-generation Hawaiian-American, he teaches at The Muse Writers Center & reads for Quarterly West. @jeffrey_hecker

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