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The Missouri Review

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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