Daisy Bassen

Two Poems

Solitary

You make friends

With your own funk,

The conversation offered

By the untamed flora

Of your armpit, your groin,

Say good morning, man 

To the undeniable congeniality

Of unwashed, calloused feet.

You dream vivid, then dull—

Burned toast, malt liquor,

The steering wheel catching

And its deliquescent release;

You always wake up

And it’s never a day.

Your goddamn memories,

You lay your head down

They’re your grandma’s lap

And it doesn’t matter, true

Or not, they’re yours, everything

That’s left, more reliable

Than a heartbeat inside your ear,

The autonomy of vomit

Slick, working its way out.

You remember your grandmother,

Her voice like the bass shaking

Every car, every driver amped,

A siren that won’t stop, won’t arrive,

Any little clemency.

Competency

Nothing anyone would say,

Push or don’t push or that’s right,

Just like that, mama makes any difference

When the baby crowns, the pattern

Of her amnion-wet curls a harbinger

Like tea leaves in the cup’s curved well,

A sign of the reign to come.

There is no voice, not even God Almighty

In the mouth of the nurse, in the glare

Of the sodium light aimed at your perineum,

That commands you and there’s no one

Who knows what made your labor begin.

You will spend your whole life understanding

That you were capable of this, this visceral

Mystery, this shrieking solution.

We cannot make them stop confessing

When we come to talk in a room no house-fly

Ever visits, window-less, windows a memory

They might also mention, their thoughts unsecured

Like the white kitchen curtains. We cannot stop listening

When they answer questions we don’t ask

I ran away down the street

I touched her

I left the gun I did it it was me.

I look away and the guard isn’t watching me

Or the round-cheeked clock. He’s bored.

I’m at your mercy.

Daisy Bassen is a poet and practicing physician who graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program and completed her medical training at The University of Rochester and Brown. Her work has been published in Oberon, The Delmarva Review, The Sow’s Ear, and Tuck Magazine as well as multiple other journals. She was a semi-finalist in the 2016 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, a finalist in the 2018 Adelaide Literary Prize, and the winner of the So to Speak 2019 Poetry Contest and the 2019 ILDS White Mice Contest. She was doubly nominated for the 2019 Best of the Net Anthology and for a 2019 Pushcart Prize. She lives in Rhode Island with her family.