FIRST RIGHT OF REFUSAL

by Laura Rodley

Don’t pray for me anymore
say the grey whales
birthing calves
off the Pacific coast.
Don’t pray for me anymore
say the right whales
siphoning plankton and krill
off the Atlantic coast.
Don’t pray for me
squawk the seagulls
pedaling pizza
on the beach in Ocean Park,
their beaks full of crust.
Don’t pray for me
say the dying in their beds,
sheets cool and soft.
Don’t pray for me
mewed the tiny black and white
kitten under the stairwell
at the Econo Lodge in Columbus,
it is not your pieces of chicken
that saved me, nor your water
though I was dying of thirst.
I can make it on my own.


Laura Rodley’s New Verse News poem “Resurrection” has won a Pushcart Prize and 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.