Daisy Bassen
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This girl could find solutions to the climate crisis,
so we’re told, to persuade us to send $27 a month,
an odd number someone in marketing must’ve chosen
for being the absolute limit of what an average liberal
would be willing to pay. $28 is too much, evidently;
they bought a full-page ad for the $27 and you and I
both know they’d have pushed for $28 if they thought
they’d get it. I get it. I’d rather pay $27 a month
so this girl could lie on her floor and read a book held
over her head, the words falling down with dust motes
into her eyes, all the way down into her occipital lobe,
so she can be bored on Tuesday, to be ordinary, fussing
over her outfit, her desire to sleep in instead of saving
us with carbon locking or blocking, stocking an ark
with heritage grains as near to spores as we can stomach,
Cendrillon still picking over lentils, the impossible
carved into the window’s apron and sash, inanimate, em dashes might be good here
not looming over her, embodied, girdled. There’s enough
gravity for us, the most obvious force, worth screaming
over when you leave the buoyancy of your caul,
the executive of your first fall. I put myself to sleep
giving a fictional character all he’d never have: a bed
with blankets folded at the foot, a table with two chairs,
a green sill full of alien plants that look most like orchids
and flowering rosemary, undecided about a rag rug for him
to walk on barefoot. I should know I’m not alone, wanting so
not to need any more martyrs advertised as ringless heroes.
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maybe cut 'ringless' or change 'I should know I'm not alone' to a different phrase that says more? there were comments that the last sentence trips them up. "The last line particularly feels like it's missing or has a wrong word there." I do like 'martyrs advertised as heroes' a lot.
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Daisy Bassen is a poet and child psychiatrist who graduated 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 Salamander, McSweeney’s, Smartish Pace, Plume, and [PANK], among other journals. She was the winner of the So to Speak 2019 Poetry Contest, the 2019 ILDS White Mice Contest, the 2020 Beullah Rose Poetry Prize, and the 2022 Erskine J Poetry Prize. Born and raised in New York, she lives in Rhode Island with her family. Her fiction is represented by Jennifer Lyons of Jennifer Lyons Agency.