Honorable Mention, Samuel Washington Allen Prize, selected by Charles Coe
burning bright
a cento
I.
I am eating bread looking at the stars.
A chewed over hour, late.
Of course, there is nothing the matter with the stars
You have to say. We want
strong forces, weak forces
Guardian angels, wherever you’re hiding
Or did you miss your way?—
The silvery zigzag line
I wish them back into their button-down shirts
From the far nether regions
II.
Sometimes I wonder why my husband
is on the inside
And when two people have loved each other
There is nothing the matter with speech
Sharing its secret
Do as you please, your will is mine;
How is it we are absorbed so easily
Sometimes I get mixed up and instead of bread
Somewhere warming the air we breathe
The magpies gaze at us, still
III.
Stars are far, far away
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.
What forced you here, we cannot know,
It is how I have come to it
Which raises a question
Can it be that nothing
Nothing’s detachable.
We mean no harm. We want
The singing in the electrical woods.
I’m learning not to tamper with anger.
IV.
I am so engrossed, don’t even ask
I imagine all the clocks have died in the night
wherever they’ve been set down
Your answers to our questions
Don’t be misled:
I have scrawled audible lifelines along the edges
In energies pure enough not to carry heat
Enjoy it without fear—
But all we can say now is,
How much past we have
Cento indebted to: Paul Muldoon, W.S Merwin, Monica Youn, Jenny Xie, Efe Murad, Jane Hirschfield, Yusef Komunyakaa, Philip Freneau, Troy Jollimore, and Sally Van Doren
Daisy Bassen
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, Crab Creek Review, Little Patuxent Review, 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 2022 Erskine J Poetry Prize. She was nominated for the 2019, 2021, and 2022 Best of the Net Anthology and for a 2019 and 2020 Pushcart Prize. Born and raised in New York, she lives in Rhode Island with her family.