I Imagine You, Crow I watch your shadow pass over a newly sprouted bed of tulips, weave in and out the latticework of trees, or pause atop a telephone wire, loosening a call of grating caws and clicks I read as messages from beyond my knowing. Your black beak and white eye point at me before you lift and flit past so close your wings fan my cheeks. Grief-stricken years have passed like a blight, a hole that deepens since I buried my daughter in spring’s softening earth. Crow, when you visit, my steps falter and my heart beats faster as I imagine you carry the soul I once carried, now dropping out of the sky to make me whole.
—Submitted on 10/13/2022
Jane Ellen Glasser is the author of Selected Poems(FutureCycle Press, 2019), Staying Afloat during a Plague (Cyberwit.net, 2021), Crow Songs (Cyberwit.net, 2021) and a number of previous collections. Her poetry has appeared in The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Georgia Review, among other journals. Glasser was a co-founder of the nonprofit arts organization and journal New Virginia Review.
Editor’s Note: The series title Flush Left refers to the fact that, due to our limited WordPress skills, we are only considering poems that are flush left. Poems already in our Submittable queue that have simple non-flush-left formatting may be considered for publication.
Visit our Kickstarter for A MONTH OF SOMEDAY, the debut chapbook by Gerald Wagoner.