Glen Armstrong (he/him) holds an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and edits a poetry journal called Cruel Garters. His latest book is Night School: Selected Early Poems.
His work has been previously featured by In Parentheses.
Antonyms for “Salt of the Earth”
1.
Father lights a fat cigar
out beyond the yellow squash,
where one kooky sunflower
flips off the sky.
2.
Sister’s sturdy box arrives.
Oh, nothing.
Maybe mud.
She says when pressed
about its contents.
Short Subject
The film got weird then terrible
then weird again then wonderful
then loose in the manner that a human
being might discover looseness
in a shoelace, belt bras strap,
or tooth.
It was finally happening.
We would soon need to understand:
Blue point oyster.
Prehistory.
Pearl necklace.
Personal history.
The reckless nature of suffrage.
Those shaven legs
and the bicycle.
We were saying our goodbyes,
stretching them out
to last a week or so.
The ice cubes in our drinks
gathered light,
fused together
then dissolved.
Relativity
I’ve been charged with duplicity and have pleaded multiplicity. I am not the only one listening.
From here, the lecturer sounds like a precocious child. From a mile away, the lecturer sounds like an oversized mayfly banging against the windshield of a Honda Civic, its system of coordinates too narrow to affect its freedom. The lecturer bangs head against the lectured. The ideas speed up as they begin to sink in.
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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 Volume 10
48 pages, published 10/15/2025
in parentheses 
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