Editor's Prize Winner | June 19, 2020
Poems: The Lucie Odes
Heather Treseler
The Lucie Odes
For Lucie Nell Beaudet (1960-2018)
I.
I’d known you six years before you told me
how your first husband pimped you out—
used the cash to buy a fried-chicken franchise
along a rural highway in Alabama. How you
slept under the counter where you cashiered
wings and thighs. How you rinsed, out back,
and spread baby powder across a bath towel
to soak up the tumid August sweat, keep offs
kittering roaches. For the rest of your life
you had nothing to do with chicken. Mixed,
in memory, with the smell of strange men’s
semen. How you dreaded what came despite
rough-shod precaution. How you stole from
the till, dollar at a time, until you had enough
for a bus to the clinic. I picture you there alone,
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