Best of the Net nominee, Rich Glinnen, enjoys bowling, and eating his daughter’s cheeks at his home in Bayside, NY. His work can be read in various print and online journals, as well as on his Tumblr and Instagram pages. His wife calls him Ho-ho.
Rich Glinnen has had work previously featured in In Parentheses.
Photography by P. M. Chatelain
More Acceptable
It wouldn’t be kosher to hit another,
Especially one of your age and gender,
Which is why I wish I could transform
Into a 60-year-old woman,
Preferably one who used to burn bras,
Whose hammy hands are presently barbed
With rings gifted by men she outpaced
And punch you in your too-happy face.
Seconds
Time after time I chew too fast
And bite the inside of my lip.
It swells and gets in the way
Of anticipated holidays.
Then I bite it again.
So many slapped tables,
Red dot-blotted napkins.
A canker rankles,
Stings like a jab
With each snare of wing.
The more I eat
The more of me I consume,
And I always have room.
Family Stroll
We took turns with the stroller’s reins
Like we were passing a bottle
On our afternoon waddle,
My mother, wife, and me,
Letting lights and traffic
Dictate our course,
A traveling carousel:
Two parts cart,
One part horse.
Brothers
Following a bout of socializing
There’s always something I deem bothersome.
I deem bothersome.
Almost sounds Dickensian if you say it quickly.
Ideembothersome.
A crab akin to Ebenezer Scrooge.
A long-lost brother, perhaps,
Though only in name.
They each know where the other lives
And steer their lives appropriately
So to avoid words that will bother them,
Not so much in the moment,
But at the evening’s end,
Upon passing their overshadowed homes,
Which they won’t notice
For the bright replays in their minds,
Repeating till every word—
Even those unsaid—are unkind.
Another Sort of Drawing
An Asian woman stands behind her screen door
Looking at a can of cat food upon her patio.
I imagine she’s wondering if the cat came,
And since I can’t see the food in the can
From my lowly angle as I walk past,
I suppose I will never know. But she does know.
I wish I could draw. This would make a fine picture.
But a poem is the best I can do.
I’m sure the screen door I’ve installed in your head
Is more realistic than the image I would’ve sketched.
It would have been so gray and ambiguous
That you wouldn’t be able to focus on anything else:
The cat food can of indeterminate reserve,
The whereabouts of the implied cat,
The pink rain boots beside the welcome mat,
Nor the Asian woman, who would be blotted out
By the steel smoke of my crude, flat-tipped crayon.
From the Editor:
We hope that readers receive In Parentheses as a medium through which the evolution of human thought can be appreciated, nurtured and precipitated. It will present a dynamo of artistic expression, journalism, informal analysis of our daily world, entertainment of ideas considered lofty and criticism of today’s popular culture. The featured content does not follow any specific ideology except for that of intellectual expansion of the masses.
Founded in late 2011, In Parentheses prides itself upon analysis of the current condition of intelligence in the minds of these young people, and building a hypothesis for one looming question: what comes after Post-Modernism?
The idea for this magazine stems from a simple conversation regarding the aforementioned question, which drew out the need to identify our generation’s place in literary history.
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By In Parentheses in IP Volume 7
32 pages, published 1/15/2022
in parentheses 