Rich Glinnen

Writer and poet

[richglinnen]

Nose

Before my third was born I could say things like, “My kids are my lungs. She is my left lung and he is my right, and without them both I wouldn’t be able to breathe.”

But now the baby needs to be something, because I can’t have my oldest be lungs and her nothing. She was already that once. She’s better this way,

even if I can only glimpse her when I wince amid the chaos the other two bring, slamming cymbals without the decency of timing because they’re invisible.

[richglinnen]

Accident

When picking up my daughter from school, the teacher told me she had an accident. It wasn’t her fault, she said, there was a long line and they were waiting a while.

My daughter, more or less, echoed the same story in the car, how she waited a long time and peed on the floor, but then she went on to reassure me that it’s ok, because they cleaned it.

This is when I felt the need to say it would have been ok, even if they didn’t clean it,

even if the little puddle you left somehow started to follow you around like a puppy and learn tricks you taught her (it would be a her, naturally),

following obediently by your side, napping in your empty milk container instead of on the floor where she could get hurt.

But from one parent to another, know that there will be times when she forgets herself and does something out of character,

like jumping up on your teacher in a shimmering display of excitement and staining her pants, as if your teacher had an accident,

because, for the record, that is what happened today.

[richglinnen]

Pretend

As I sat at the kitchen table well after the kids’ bedtime and listened to them cry behind their closed bedroom door, it occurred to me their ponies—the imaginary ones they were hellbent on galloping out of their room time after time regardless of their parents’ wishes— would have tasted better with a dab of mint jelly.

[richglinnen]

It’s Dark Inside My Body

It’s dark inside my body. Not glowing red like I sometimes think. My lungs pump in complete darkness. My cloaked heart beats in solitude

like so many blotted planets without nearby stars to talk them up, and shed light on their unique bodies, which have accomplished and endured so much.

Sometimes when I rant in a brightly lit place, I imagine the light finding my choppy mouth, and how it must appear like a twinkling star to my sunken organs, who toil my entire life until their wishes are granted.

[richglinnen]

Cat Sitting in the Sink

He’s going to shit when he sees this. Hell, I might even shit. Not the worst timing for that to happen. But seriously, he eats this sort of thing up.

I know he will, too, because he isn’t holding the baby. Once he turns around and stops whatever he’s doing in the refrigerator, it’s going to be all:

“What are you doing in there? You’re so silly, Silly Pants. You’re not a bowl. Are you a bowl? No, I didn’t think so. And you’re not spoons. That I know. You’re squishy and that’s that.”

Just watch. He won’t know what hit him. Ok. The door is closed. Here it comes. Be cool, baby. And don’t forget: eye contact.

[richglinnen]

Whistler’s Bridge

I heard a story about Whistler, the painter, who, while in school, was assigned to compose a bridge. Apparently, he put two kids on the bridge, and the teacher told him to remove them because they were unnecessary. So he did, and handed into his teacher a revised version with two little tombstones on the bank below. This is where the story ends, as it was told to me, but I would have liked to see the teacher instruct young Whistler to remove the tombstones, and, upon receiving the final version, feeling uneasy, for he could never really know for sure if the bank was an ordinary swath of topography or a field of unmarked graves, of earth, no longer bloated with fresh death, but more or less level, save for a patch here and there.

[richglinnen]

Snuff

I turned around on the couch and watched my daughter pull my son down the hall on his blue scooter, and when they were out of sight, all that remained in the landscape of my view— like molasses under the ceiling light— was the hardwood floor they once covered, the scuffed wall they eclipsed bit by bit, a scarcely-used cabinet with nothing in it, and another wall, the one in the living room, where we were, which they had no part of, sprayed with the silhouette of my wife’s spectacled head looking down at her phone, smothering lips that moved like those caught under the gray water’s poker face.

[richglinnen]

Every Time We Speak, I Lose a Brother

You are well. So am I. We check our wrist watches, call it, then go our separate ways, each holding one end.

There’s isn’t a tug, nor a trail left behind. It comes apart effortlessly like it’s meant to be.

[richglinnen]

Mess

Skirting my daughter’s desert village of reflective houses, which resemble pots and pans, and can be painful to look at, is a giant rock formation seated atop a mesa, which resembles a father pressing his middle finger and thumb into his eyes.

[richglinnen]

Pieces

“We have to go to bed.” “We?” “Yeah. Why? You’re not coming to bed?” “You better take out that W and that E and put in an I.” “You could’ve just turned the W upside down.” “Yeah. That’s much better.” (Laughter) “That’s why you’re the writer.”

Before she said that, I had a feeling it was something worth jotting down into my phone’s notepad. After she said that, I knew it was something. She calls me a writer, but I’d be a typer without her. My poems would be like forms, with words spilled everywhere, except in the parts that distinguish them from others.

[richglinnen]

Sentiment

Your friends search the air above your hair, confused by what you said: you can come from so many places. Your enemies hear you as loud and clear as their hateful faces. They know more than what you meant. Once friends, they will always be something along those lines. You can tell them anything and they will make it make sense. They will get you.

[richglinnen]

Hearsay

You smelled bastard the way mustachioed men with poor vision smell the laughter of children.

When my grandfather died, you took a toothbrush to your New Balances and parked your van outside our door, even though it was an SUV. You did everything right,

which made it impossible to report everything I sensed wrong in you. A bouquet for my mother and a manual stuffed into your back pocket for me. If you made me take it out, if my fingers brushed it, I would have had a case, but it was wrapped in newspaper, and you said, Here’s everything you’re doing wrong, son, and I had no choice but to be grateful.

If my father were alive today, I’d try to strangle him, so he would strangle me.

Anyway, it was still early on, and he was still at the door, promising eggs, which made me think continental breakfast, not maggots, phase one.

My mother let him in, and he became a father. The father I never wanted. In every sense, a real father.

My mother let him in. The door swung in like a hatchet and left birthmarks: gashes birthing flies, planted by his dainty hand. Nobody sees the planter for the harvest. He’s absent, as saintly as the dead,

while the flies hum everything I’m doing wrong with a thousand of his mouths that are too small for anyone else to see: they say shut up, they say shower, they say it’s not like he’s a murderer or a pedophile or anything.

They say it’s because he loves you. And they believe it, too. Poor bastards.

[richglinnen]

hi! I think your writing is lovely and just wanted to pop by to tell you. Also a little tip is to have a profile pic and backround pic so people don't assume your a bot!

Thank you very much, I appreciate you.

Beep boop beep,

Rich