Cleaning Out

She said goodbye

to alarm clocks,

appointment books

bank accounts,

cell phones,

welcome mats,

she scrubbed

guilt and regret

from the floorboards,

evicted troublesome

guests, opened

windows and doors

to let her house breathe

till she was clean

as a wind-stripped thicket,

airy as the left-

open spaces of a

Henri Moore sculpture,

the essence of form

(a face, a chest, an arm)

so clearly defined

by being absent.

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Jane Ellen Glasser’s poetry has appeared in Hudson Review, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Georgia Review. In the past she reviewed poetry books for Virginian-Pilot, edited poetry for Ghent Quarterly and Lady Jane’s Miscellany, and co-founded the nonprofit arts organization and journal New Virginia Review. Her first collection, Naming the Darkness (with an introduction by W. D. Snodgrass) was issued by Road Publishers in 1991. She won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry 2005 for Light Persists and The Long Life won the Poetica Publishing Company Chapbook Contest in 2011. The Red Coat (2013), Cracks (2015), and In the Shadow of Paradise (2017) are available from FutureCycle Press. Selected Works: 1980-2019 is due out in 2019. See more at www.janeellenglasser.com.