Poems: Chelsea B. DesAutels
Maybe You Need to Write a Poem About Mercy
after Robert Hass
Start this one with the woman standing at the edge
of the woods. Or the desert, it doesn’t matter,
what matters is she’s standing under a darkening sky
and she knows, at this point, having spent months
in the hospital, that there’s nothing she can do—
no threshold between threat and tranquility,
no demarcation she can draw around herself
for her child for protection, everything is actually
everything else, the stone just kicked
and whatever comes next are the same.
Poems: The Lucie Odes
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,
Poetry: Diane Seuss
Featuring the poems:
[My first crush was Wild Bill. . . .]
[His body was barely cold. . . .]
[I can’t see her clearly. . . .]
[I can’t say I loved punk when punk was contagious. . . .]
[What do you think Elvis’s best song was. . . .]
[Then, I account it high time to get to sea. . . .]
[Once, I took a Greyhound north across an icy bridge. . . .]
[Takes time to get to minimalism. . . .]
Editors’ Prize Poetry Feature: Meghann Plunkett
Featuring the poems:
- In the Fist of the Blade Holder
- Boston, 1992
- South County, Matunuck, RI
- 1996
- To My Assailant, 15 Years Later
- Awaiting the Elegy
- The Dove