BOARDER
by Daisy G. Bassen
The egg is balanced on the rim of the glass bowl.
It fills the space my palm is meant to hold.
The energy that will become the cracking
Limns the shell. The moment cracks
With the possibility that blood will streak
Through the yolk, or worse, a stillbirth.
I sent you home and to what I cannot know.
Your world is cracking around you.
You knew the words to say but you would not
Say them. You wanted to leave, I helped
You leave. You said,
Enough,
And it was enough.
And it wasn’t. I slept, the night a dead man’s float,
And through it, the doubt rippled towards me,
A reverse Gulf Stream. It will be a very long time
Before rescue arrives.
About the Author:
Daisy G. Bassen is a psychiatrist, wife, mother and poet. She graduated from Princeton University with a degree in English and has been published in Oberon, The Sow’s Ear, SUSAN|The Journal and AMWA Literary Journal. She was a semi-finalist in the 2016 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. Born in New York, she now lives in Rhode Island with her husband and three children.