What She Longed For

To have each day open

like a love letter;

to slip out of her past

the way an unzipped dress

puddles to the floor;

to empty the mind

and feel it flap

like a windsock;

to let spirit play,

dust motes

on ladders of light;

to set her senses

singing

through all her organs;

to dance

across continents

while standing still;

to float

beneath the moon

in a Chagall painting.

to be awake

in her dreaming.

Winter's Lessons

Trees stripped of summer's store

and fall's giveaway reveal the bones

of what stays. The river frozen

to the shore's lip speaks less,

keeps to itself what belongs to itself.

The bear in his den, the bat suspended

in his cave, know when to sleep

and when to wake. No longer

hitched to the world's rhythms,

no longer ruled by appetite, they wait

for an inner pull to rouse them.

And what is more instructional

than snowfall, its knack for making

the familiar new. Or night, arriving early,

flooding its borders at both ends.

Jane Ellen Glasser's poetry has appeared in numerous journals, such as Hudson Review, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Georgia Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, and Poetry Northwest. Her poems have garnered numerous awards from the Irene Leache Society, Puddingstone, and the Poetry Society of Virginia, and she has been recognized for outstanding articles on teaching poetry that were featured in Virginia English Bulletin and English Journal. In the past she reviewed poetry books for the Virginian-Pilot, edited poetry for the Ghent Quarterly and Lady Jane's Miscellany, and co-founded the nonprofit arts organization and journal New Virginia Review.  A first collection of her poetry, 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, and her award-winning book, Light Persists, published by Tampa University Press in April 2006, received an honorable mention in the 2007 Library of Virginia Literary Awards. Her chapbook On the Corner of Yesterday, published in 2010, was followed by The Long Life, which won the Poetica Publishing Company Chapbook Contest 2011. Her latest collection, The Red Coat, appeared from FutureCycle Press in 2013. Glasser volunteers at the Paul Rein Detention Facility in Broward County, conducting poetry workshops with inmates. She is a member of The Poetry Society of Virginia, The Writers' Network of South Florida, and The Fort Lauderdale Writers' Group.