joseph glandorf
footnotes to the collected works
This is my first poem. The first time we met, it crashed through my window and bit off a piece of my left ear. For a month or two afterwards I felt like Van Gogh. But the day it came back, I wrestled it to the ground and stuck it full of the broken glass. This was the final draft.
This is my second poem. It’s a forest I used to hike through. The snow there always fell in the first weeks of winter. Once when I visited I didn’t come out until a year later, with a buck’s antlers and a beard bristling with ice. That image means a lot more to me now than it used to. Watch yourself on the frozen creek.
This is my third poem. It smells like the way a sunset would burn in a charcoal grill. When you run your finger down its spine, it feels like concrete but sounds like an acoustic guitar.
This is my fourth poem. The whole thing is one long metaphor, but what it means is a secret.
This is my fifth poem. It’s partly about how when I was thirteen I met a girl at summer camp with the most familiar face, and partly about how we kissed under the stars on the dock by the lake. But it’s mostly about how that never happened to me, because I saw it all in a movie.
This is my sixth poem. It’s a metaphor for everything the fourth one leaves out.
This is my seventh poem. It’s about how I changed my name, and it includes every letter in the alphabet but x.
This is my eighth poem. It’s a noir drama, with a soundtrack inspired by Debussy.
This is my ninth poem. It’s a .50 cal with an effective range of 1200 meters. But the last time I pulled the trigger, it blew up in my hands. I wish you had written it instead. You might have done it better, or not at all.
This is my tenth poem. Though its central image is a staircase, it follows a cyclical structure. A neighborhood cat is lurking somewhere in the last five lines, but if you don’t catch him by the last two, you’ll never see him there again.
My eleventh poem has been omitted from this edition, for reasons detailed in the seventh poem.
This is my twelfth poem. The whole thing is written in verbs. I wrote it while I was looking at the sky, watching everything but the clouds.
This is my last poem. It’s about you. It’s inspired by the time I took Rilke fishing on the Amalfi Coast. I got too nervous about starting it, so I had him write it for me. But it’s curved like a mirror, so if you look close enough you’ll see my face. I don’t want you to make any mistakes. It’s only me here.
JOSEPH GLANDORF IS A RECENT GRADUATE OF THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY AND CURRENTLY LIVES IN CINCINNATI, OHIO. HIS WORK HAS PREVIOUSLY BEEN PUBLISHED IN WHAT ARE BIRDS?