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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, McSweeney’s, The Sow’s Ear, and [PANK] as well as multiple other journals. She was a semi-finalist in the 2016 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry and the winner of the So to Speak 2019 Poetry Contest, the 2019 ILDS White Mice Contest, and the 2020 Beullah Rose Poetry Prize. Bassen was doubly nominated for the 2019 Best of the Net Anthology and for a 2019 and 2020 Pushcart Prize. She lives in Rhode Island with her family.
©2021 West Trade Review
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Daisy Bassen
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Twenty Twenty: Thanksgiving in Small Nunbers
The crusts are made of flour, fat cut in,
Butter, leaf-lard collected from the borders
Of kidney; you’re not supposed to touch
Too much. You fill it with whatever you want,
Custard, squash, amber apples cooked into sauce,
Grief, the unrung bell, lies, rates, the cold side
Of the bed, your unmasked neighbors’ children’s
Screams, rain falling on a day that’s too warm,
The hiss of uncured wood burning, of ventilators,
The air in the field hospital that opens on Monday.
It’s best blind-baked, the fluted edge brown
As leaves, as raw sugar. Take a soup spoon
From the drawer and shovel in the biggest bite
You can. There’s no etiquette for today, honey.
Image by Pricilla Du Preez on Unsplash
