It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
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.
Jane Ellen Glasser’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals, such as The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Georgia Review. In the past she served as the poetry critic for The Virginian-Pilot, poetry editor for the Ghent Quarterly and Lady Jane’s Miscellany, and co-founder of the nonprofit arts organization and journal New Virginia Review. She won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry for Light Persists (2006), and the Poetica Publishing Chapbook Contest for The Long Life (2011). Her recent collectios are Jane Ellen Glasser: Selected Poems (2019), Staying Afloat during a Plague (2021) and Crow Songs (2021). Visit janeellenglasser.com.
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I quite like this terse poem that does just what it says: It creates an absence through its form, and in that opened out space, the reader is left to ponder what it means to "clean out" a self, a life; and when we think of that, then we think of what is "there," of what is constituting a self or a life.