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Saturday, April 30, 2016

LAND OF THE LIVING

by Laura Rodley


Image source: Pinterest


It is late April and night peepers sleep;
it is too warm right now for them to weep.

They want a cool night, to turn on spring’s lathe,
awaking in the pond where wood ducks bathe.

Too warm for them and too cold for my Dad
resting in his pond of electric bed, glad

to close his eyes and breathe, oxygen on,
waiting for Rachel Maddow, nighttime fawn

who only speaks through airways, her hollow
full of lights, as though the sun she swallows;

as soon as the lights are dim, she retreats
back into the deep woods on sneakered feet,

a fawn who speaks English, siphons the news,
that now is keeping my Dad living, glued.


Laura Rodley’s New Verse News poem “Resurrection” appears in The Pushcart Prlze XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses (2013 edition). She was nominated twice before for the Prize as well as for Best of the Net. Her chapbook Rappelling Blue Light, a Mass Book Award nominee,  won honorable mention for the New England Poetry Society Jean Pedrick Award. Her second chapbook Your Left Front Wheel is Coming Loose was also nominated for a Mass Book Award and a L.L.Winship/Penn New England Award. Both were published by Finishing Line Press.  Co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, she teaches creative writing and works as contributing writer and photographer for the Daily Hampshire Gazette.  She edited As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology, Volume I and Volume II.