The Glacier
Issue Two
Winter 2023

NY Times Obit

Memorialized as the first woman to nourish
death from a 20’ x 12’ room, coffee slowly
cooling while suicide drones liberate flesh
from bone, children from drawings placed
in drawers, wrapped in muslin, reaching beyond
the lines, a future without fingers fragrant
with lavender, an ivy league editor wishing
one Congrats! on being a gender, who saves
calories for booze, I wait, stone-caressed,
for my accolades – a dazed girl inked in red.

One Every Day

I didn’t take a pill
this morning. I barely
can stand. Crippling
anxiety. One every day.
 
As a child, I was taught
to love the taste of soap,
words scrubbed clean
like a book w/o a binding,
pages never written, never
read. When asleep I save
kittens, well, only One –
 
Though I haven’t been
home for years, my mom
still sends pictures of blue
necked tanagers, dead for
a day, maybe more, killed
by what still lurks inside
our garden walls: the One.
 
At night, when the world
is quiet, saving for a dim
prison light, I sit in fear,
pills to pills. One every day.

LAINE DERR holds an MFA from Northern Arizona University and has published interviews with Carl Phillips, Ross Gay, Ted Kooser, and Robert Pinsky. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming from Full Bleed + The Phillips Collection, ZYZZYVA, Portland Review, Chapter House, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.

BACK

ISSUE TWO HOME