The Glacier
Issue Two
Winter 2023

Regret Is Not a Pipe

And on the menu is not an all-you-can-eat 
buffet of second chances. Surely as I looked 
in the mirror this morning and saw beauty

slumped over like a wind-up doll; surely
as my heart’s a footnote, say, 
or that slant of light without a prism.

The moon straps on its stilts and wades
through the drowning city. The sky, too, has legs.
Like many of us, forgets to use them.

The first time I had sex was in a restroom
at Pizza Hut. My greatest disappointment?
He didn’t write my name on the toilet stall.

Though the past, I admit, isn’t exactly easy reading,
the future’s a parking meter and these days 
who carries quarters? Regret isn’t a pipe—

you can’t stuff it or smoke it. Just as I couldn’t stop 
that wave, mid-crest, and deliver it back
to an unbroken sea. The Museum of What-If

is my favorite museum. All those still lifes suspended
in time, and on that wall, there’s my self-portrait,
the work of art I never grew up to be.




Note: “Legs of the Sky” is the title of a poem by René Magritte

Dear Reader

I want to shower you with original thoughts.

I want to say Reality is a fedora 
and have you wolf whistle in agreement.

Of course Reality really is a fedora
(or a Chia pet or an ice cream headache),

so it shouldn’t be much of an ask.

I’ll pour you a glass of tragedy, 
and not the cheap stuff. I’ll refer to my heart

as a lost sock, or if you prefer,
a wrecking ball. At no time will your resistance

rhyme, even slantly, with indifference.

When I watch the sun’s fist sucker punch morning, 
I’ll want to liken it to lucha libre. 

For contrast, then, I’ll need to compare kabuki
to the rising moon. Probably I rely on figuration 

because I’m afraid of you seeing me naked. 

You wouldn’t be the first, dear reader,
to take one look, and demand a full refund. 

Before you got here, I spent a really long time

folding nothing’s laundry. I positioned
this sentence in such a way as to hide

my darlings’ blood stain on the rug.
Can I tell you a secret? I’m a serial

fabulist. I want you to forget what I said earlier
about reality. I don’t know

may be the truest phrase I’ll ever utter.

Diorama with Forest and Glancing

I’m wondering, today, about the fate 
of my shadow at midnight. I’m interrogating 
desire’s calzone, its ratio of dough to filling. 
The empath in me seeks to understand
why my body’s hellbent on mutiny. 
At the open house I couldn’t resist 
taking a peek inside the double oven.
We light our candles at the altar of scandal.
We hope the bread crumbs will lead us home.
Do you think it’s morally defensible 
to tip the devil’s doorman? 
The jacuzzi in the honeymoon suite 
was more petite than I remembered it. 
Fortunately, I’m not obliged to atone 
for the sins of my imagination.
Sometimes the Elvis impersonator 
actually sounds better than Elvis. 
We construct our dioramas. 
They are painfully accurate. 
Our irreconcilable differences have led us
deep into the same dark woods.

How to Be an Understudy

My soul is background music. 
Night’s a chauffeur, its limo 

full of stars. The prognosis 
had stage fright; one falls

into love—on a scale of eight to ten,
how would you rate your reasonable doubt?

When I look in regret’s mirror
I see the faces of my unborn children.

Between the rock and the hard place,
free-will’s glimmering mirage.

Fetal, the survey shows, 
is the most popular sleeping position;

and though seahorses, barn owls, coyotes,
all mate for life, I wouldn’t mind being 

the solitary axolotl
if it meant I had a shot at regenerating 

this heart. Do the seasons, I wonder,
think of themselves as ephemeral?

My biological clock fell forward
but I wish, now, it could spring back.

We scrape off our mistakes to find 
three more layers of god-awful wallpaper.

I prayed for a baker’s dozen,
assuming a few might come cracked.

LARA EGGER is the author of How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It, (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021), which won the John C. Zacharis First Book Award. Her poems have appeared, or will soon appear, in Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Conduit, Bennington Review, Southeast Review, Ninth Letter, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Australia, Egger now lives in Boston where she co-owns a tapas bar. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

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