ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Joshua Zeitler is a queer, nonbinary writer based in rural Michigan. They are the author of the chapbook Bliss Road (Seven Kitchens Press, 2025), and their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Foglifter, Diode, Nimrod, Shō, and elsewhere. They are the poetry editor for The Long & The Short of It, a substack-based literary magazine.
June 17, 2026
Accidental
The wrecked truck on the roadside seemed a film prop,
balled-up tin foil on blank black tile,
meaningless to the panning camera, all-consuming
to the auteurist eye behind it. Next morning I learned
there were no casualties, but it struck me—
that space between discoveries, in which I drove
the dark highway home, ate cubed watermelon
from a bamboo bowl, danced to Dehd
alone in my fenced-in back yard by starlight, slept
like a colicky baby. I brushed my teeth before breakfast.
I keep picturing it there, discarded, decorative somehow,
the body’s bespoke seams sparkling in the high beams
as if it had never traveled anywhere, had been placed
just so for me to find, to slip in my mind’s back pocket
and occasionally pat, worried I’ve forgotten it, like a key
mostly obeyed
then thrillingly not.
This poem came to me in a bit of a dry spell; I was struggling to connect with the world and, as a result, with the act of writing. I began to try to pay deeper attention to what moved me, to where those feelings were coming from and where they were headed. When I saw a car wreck driving home, I began to compose a poem in my head, going over and over it to commit it to memory before it left me. I challenged myself to load the opening lines with as many stressed syllables as possible, to embed the accident, the crumpled vehicle, into the syntax of the poem. The first draft was written on the back of a gas station receipt.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published weekly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
