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Cold. So cold. Twelve years
her body beneath frozen ground.
Nothing can warm me.
Not a steaming cup of black tea.
Not a hot bath. Not the heat
of a man’s wanting.
The old lie: Time heals....
Again, I carry her inside me,
heavier each year. She would have been
thirty- four this May. A lawyer
defending the disposable, the broken down.
What is left of her? Hair, nails, body
bare as the naked trees. Cold. Colder
than the frost stiffened grass
at Forest Lawn. Where is the husband?
The home alive with children’s sounds?
At night I hear her bones clack
like thousands of drumsticks in my head.
Quiet. Deadly quiet. Her room.
Jane Ellen Glasser’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals, such as The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review and Poetry Northwest. In the past she reviewed poetry books for the Virginian-Pilot, edited poetry for the Ghent Quarterly, and co-founded the nonprofit arts organization and journal New Virginia Review. Her poetry has garnered numerous awards. A first collection of her poetry, Naming the Darkness, with an introduction by Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet 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, was published by Tampa University Press. Retired from teaching English and creative writing at Norview High School, when she’s not writing she donates her time at ForKids, practices yoga, reads voraciously, and flies to Florida, to visit her daughter Hara and son-in-law Steve Frei, where she becomes a bubbe to her two granddaughters, and another on the way.
"My daughter Jessica died in a one-car accident while motoring home from Emory University on May 24, 1996. She had just graduated with high honors in women’s studies and, after a summer’s tour of Europe, was headed to the University of Virginia Law School. This poem is like leaving a small stone at graveside, a Jewish custom to commemorate a visit. Writing is one of the ways I keep her with me."
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