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2023 Hill-Kohn Prize

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HELLO GLACIER

by Isabelle Doyle

Hello Glacier you’re glittering; doesn’t light change everything? Horror April, you appear cold and bright at the quarter of the year dripping in barnacles, a relic sprouting arthropods scaley with failures of retention and vulnerability while glaciers the Icari of the sea turn slippery with sunkiss and the flesh of Amelia Earhart becomes coral in slow motion—whatever you turn on your heel around you orbit. Whose face are you wearing when you don’t recognize me? Whose flesh are you trying to keep still when you shiver? When you recall kissing like freeze tag, how when you were touched you went still and cold with shock? Whose listless, lustful girlhood, whose copy of Anna Karenina open on the counter and covered in protein powder, years-old hot sauce stains in the refrigerator, clusters of edible objects arranged into a kind of health, the 2000s melting into oceans you drifted over as ice floes, slow burning and late blooming and hungry for real love, every Instagram icon a window into a dimension of its own and so many ways to say hello, to remain unfailingly cordial despite all psychic obstacles, welcoming even to the Sunset Park, Brooklyn of your brief and startling post-adolescence and you still feel like 16, don’t you? Still feel like canned soup, yawp of gut and hunger like a massive red balloon, hunger like a missive—you feel like 9 and 10 when you were placed in certain classrooms because you needed discipline; you feel like your godfather and the highway that waved and foamed beneath him, breaking into a bridge above a cold and lively ocean—you feel nothing as foam, don’t you, Glacier? You had to keep waking up and saying hello to the world like a grinning computer. You said hello to your borders as they shrank closer to your center. The planet tumbles around in the dry cleaner; you dream of recyclable materials melting down into white hunks of sea salt—so Glacier has a tongue. You feel like 17, that emaciated body a spectacle of crows, splintery with thin meanings, functionless and baroque; you feel lik



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