Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: This prose poem intrigues me because of how much it leaves out. We know that the speaker and the unnamed “she” share the kinds of things coworkers do, in the small moments between calls, but we hear only one story, one part of a story, the “punchline and proverb.” Kiefer distills the moment to its crux, implying but leaving the larger implications (the arduous requirements of safety-net programs, what happens after we flee from a disaster) unsaid. As we each go through our own “small disasters” with their particulars right now, this one reminds us of the power of leaving a situation, even as we don’t know what exactly will happen next.
To hear Abbie read the poem, click below:
Dodge
She set the trailer on fire warming a bottle, slumped asleep at the table while the pot boiled dry. It was her boyfriend’s trailer and she shouldn’t have been there—when she signed up for WIC, she said she lived alone. So she left, everything burning. She tells me this in the silence of our ten-minute break. We answer phones for an insurance company. Take payments, complaints, the particulars of small disasters: spider-webbed windshields, hail-pocked roofs. We’re rated on accuracy, cheer, how fast we close a call. How often we slough off our headsets and hide in the bathroom. We make $9.50 an hour—good money for this county. No one just leaves a place like that I’m thinking and maybe she sees it on my face because she tells me the end of the story again. I just grabbed Mariah and got the hell out of Dodge. She crows it out. Punchline and proverb.
Abbie Kiefer is a writer from New Hampshire. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Hobart, Cortland Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and other places.
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