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Submission Guidelines: Send unpublished poems in the body of an email (NO ATTACHMENTS) to nvneditor[at]gmail.com. No simultaneous submissions. Use "Verse News Submission" as the subject line. Send a brief bio. No payment. Authors retain all rights after 1st-time appearance here. Scroll down the right sidebar for the fine print.

Sunday, February 11, 2018

DAY RUNNERS

by Laura Rodley


Photo by the poet.


Graying, white foam kicked aside
snowplow’s blade scraping bottom
thrusting wave after wave aside
breaking tides over guardrail
back into the forest’s ledged shelf,
twenty miles an hour, speed of broken sleep,
catching waves solidified as snowfall,
driver dressed in buffalo plaid shirt,
no buffalo skin upon his lap,
pink salt swirling behind, above his exhaust pipe.
He must not reach his own edge,
maintain sharpness as he thrusts the blade
down Route 2, Greenfield to Williamstown,
and back again, coffee in his thermos,
another plow ahead, wave after wave,
cars in a line behind him, crawling.


Laura Rodley, Pushcart Prize winner for her New Verse News poem "Resurrection," a quintuple Pushcart Prize nominee, and quintuple Best of Net nominee, with work in Best Indie Lit NE.  Publisher Finishing Line Press nominated her Your Left Front Wheel Is Coming Loose for a PEN L.L.Winship Award and Mass Book Award. FLP also nominated her Rappelling Blue Light for a Mass Book Award. Former co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, Rodley teaches the As You Write It memoir class and has edited and published As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology volumes I-VI, also nominated for a Mass Book Award. She was accepted at Martha’s Vineyard’s NOEPC and has been a consecutive participant in the 30 poems in 30 days fundraiser for Literacy Project. Latest books Turn Left at Normal by Big Table Publishing and Counter Point upcoming by Prolific Press