---

The littlest parts of May

are petals and the ants

that crawl among them,

but to each other,

they are the measure

of the mean, the jay’s sky

too far away to matter,

my shadow as irrelevant

as my body; a purpose

unfathomable to me

drives them, triptych ants,

the disassembled flowers:

endless more. Never,

in the full face of misery,

the breaking and the equivocal

dewdrop moment before

of dread, would they turn away,

having had enough.

---

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, 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 2021 Erskine J Poetry Prize. She lives in Rhode Island with her family.