Four Women from Zellers.
by Donna Kane

In the mall, four women from Zellers buy scratch-and-wins.
Each day at coffee in their hunter-green bibs, they take their turn
at the garbage bin (their tickets poised, their thumbnails itching).
Today, it's the tall one asking for silence,
who tells them to concentrate
hard
on luck.
When I pass, even I fall silent, as though I too could alter fate.
When it's done, she's careful to laugh, say
she never believed it anyway, and especially here,
2:30 pm, shirts to re-pin,
chicken wings thawing on a counter at home ...
"Last week I won five bucks," one says
and it doesn't matter if she's heard it before,
she's prepared to hear it again, the way I've lost things
and haven't cared, would accept finding them anywhere.