It’s likely I’m doing the pollinator garden all wrong
And even more likely that someone is going to tell me,
What I’ve planted isn’t an actual native, an imposter,
Capgras with a green thumb or greenish—the cukes
Fell to an ethereal mold, though I suspect an ancestor
Could still have made pickles of them. Sharp vinegar
And desperation fill cellars. In the local news, a man’s railing
Against the wrong kind of maple but I can’t imagine
Cutting down the trees in the yard, however much gloom
They cast. They’ve been alive so long I can’t span their trunks
With my arms. I’m little, maybe it doesn’t mean that much.
I like the bee balm by the back window, alien and familiar,
An interloper if the woman online is right, but the hummingbird
Came, and supped at that nectar like I’d done something right.
—
Daisy Bassen is a poet and community 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, New York Quarterly, and [PANK] among other journals. 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.
