There, I Fixed It For You

I was going to tell you about my revelation
Driving home from work, that the Bible is all wrong.
Right from the beginning, that first verse
And God said, let there be light: and there was light,
When after all, God could just as easily have been light,
Surrounded by it, manifest; God could just as easily have
Brought forth darkness from brilliance, the trembling,
Inchoate deep from a limitless blaze, splendor rendered
Into being only by the negative as yes finds form in no,
And it wasn’t that I missed that tricky left turn
Or got rear-ended, I didn’t have to stop for gas
And the requisite muttering about the cost, $5/gal
And rising like the brackish seas, what bullshit.
It’s that I found out when we were three months old
We could tell apart every macaque in a group
And no adult can do that. I discovered I’d lost something
I’d never known. Every one of us griping about our commutes,
Grappling with the electric disputation of sciatic nerves, the lye
Of grift and wannabe demagogues, we’d once been able
To see clearly such individual and discrete beauty, a talent
For recognition we can’t teach ourselves now, no matter
How hard we try. It’s a trade-off made for us, not by choice,
To lose the names we give before we can utter a word,
To be made stewards by time, instead of peers,
To think obscurity was our origin and indelible imprimatur.

by Daisy Bassen


Daisy Bassen is a poet and child psychiatrist who graduated from Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program, completing 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 lives in Rhode Island with her family.

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