DAISY BASSEN

Brood X

They’ve been underfoot the whole time,

Their silent throats, their working mandibles,

Busy siphoning the strength of roots,

A horde calibrated to lightless time;

The trees take the sun and strike deep,

The cicadas must mind the proxy, use it

To fix their rising. There will be billions

And some stragglers, the dozy ones who ate

Too little, appeared too late, some loose insurance

Against the climate, against the limbic estimate

Of their appeal. Colonists, ignorant, oblivious,

Called them locusts, sure crops would be scythed,

The sky made black, the suspended chord of their sex

Macabre, a plague of plagues. Wrong again.

Magicicada only want to court and pledge

Devotion, to escape death through such numberless

Dance, to let their young retreat, count, a dark matter.

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, New York Quarterly, 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, 2020, and 2023 Pushcart Prize. Born and raised in New York, she lives in Rhode Island with her family.