Northampton writer Cleo Rohn won the 2024 Beals Prize for Poetry last week for her poem, “Not Every Poem Has to Be About God.”

Rohn won the award, which included a cash prize, at Winchendon’s Beals Memorial Library. The award and the library were both named in honor of Charles L. Beals, the building’s benefactor.

Rohn, a poet, spoken word performer, and educator, has had work published in “Aurora: The Allegory Ridge Anthology,” “After Happy Hour Review,” “Brave Voices Magazine,” “Dryland Lit,” “Symposeum,” “The Song Between Our Stars,” and more. She also writes “Early Riser,” an online newsletter “about the little things that keep us whole,” according to a press release.

Local finalists included Jam Lamberg of Amherst (“The Barn”), Bill O’Connell of Amherst (“Juke Box Dream Song”), Cate Rowen of Northampton (“make when the tomatoes ripen”), Connolly Ryan of Florence (“The Genesis of Kindness”), and Hillary Smith-Maddern of Greenfield (“Charlotte Perkins Has a Gin and Tonic with Monica Lewinsky”).

Not Every Poem Has to Be About God

Once in a while, maybe, a soliloquy for the Dunkin Donuts drive-thru line,
For the exit ramps off the Mass Pike, the car fire in the breakdown lane.
For the crust-punk kids pulling out their dreadlocks.
For insurance paperwork. For being on hold.
Ode to the wacky waving arm inflatable tube man at the Jeep dealer,
breaking its empty skeleton over the horizon.
To the way the taillights of your town flow like currents.
The dying sun like melted ice cream across the highway.
Elegy for roadkill. For the muscle and sinew that’s been picked away.
For what’s left: bleaching bone, gasoline fumes swirling in marrow.
The last breath of something dying, breathed into the seed of something newly born.
For worms in the soil, for the earthquake in New Jersey,
for the way the world shifts its weight like a schoolboy with our stories on his back.
For the way the brake pedal breathes out
from the beating heart of the truck engine. Like a prayer.