Daisy Bassen: September 2021 Poet of the Month
Perseveration
What is an MRI?
What is an MRI?
She only asked a few more times
But I remember it as a hundred,
The slight climbing scale of half-steps
Within her monotone, her head
Like a heliotrope moving on its stalk.
The sickest girl on the unit,
In recent memory, the researcher
Announced, bestowing a first place
Finish. What is an MRI?
There is no answer, it’s magnetism
And the computer does something
Instead of trays of acids eating plates
In the red light darkroom, like the inside
Of a vein and not an artery.
It’s not going to explain anything,
It can’t shore up a sandcastle that’s slumping
Even before the tide eats its way back in.
It’s not going to tell why her father
Pretended he was a ghost, ha! smeared his face
Against the window in her single room.
What is an MRI? We didn’t answer,
You and I, we knew so little. We found
Our way less gracefully than zombies
With their brains melted down like wax,
Like runny vanilla custard, an invalid’s meal,
Blanc-mange. We knew not to share a glance
But I stepped closer to you, away from her.
Praxis. What is. What is an MRI.
Daisy Bassen is a poet and practicing physician who graduated from Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program and completed her medical training at The University of Rochester and Brown. Her work has appeared in Oberon, McSweeney’s and [PANK] among other journals. She lives in Rhode Island with her family.