Daisy Bassen: 1 poem
An accounting
Guilt fits in a circle, filling
The space to the edge,
The line that goes round
And round like the ring
On my finger, engraved
With the date, one day
When we made a promise
Out of all the days we did.
Staring into the sun—
You know not to do it,
The pale disc a match
To your retina, the weeds
Of ruddy vessels at the back
Of your eye. You know, I know
You know not to do it,
Transgression; you know rules,
Right, wrong, thudding
Like the struck mouth, diameter
Of a tongue-less bell. Guilt
Fits in corners, creeps
Into the avenues, crevices
When you see how much
Has been broken, hurt, virtues
Befouled, shat upon. It’s useful
To take its measure, cup-full,
Overflowing, a sewer rank
With offal, awfulness, thick
With thievery. Crows, wisely,
Fly away and babies sleep through,
Neurons too busy to make memories
Stick. We’re stuck, the rest of us,
Guilt is democratic: it touches us all.
The answer is: enfranchisement,
Black wings confident against gravity,
The sweet breath of a newborn,
Hungry soon, again, for milk, willing
To wail, to scream the house down.
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 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.