Q means quiet, it means you have not said ‘the emergency room is quiet’ and so it will not be overrun by ambulances and people who might have gone to their primary care if they had one, doctors who could be played by the red, yellow, blue plastic pieces on a board game, Chutes and Ladders, but mostly chutes, falling, falling; Q means an alien who is all-powerful and yet who is terribly taken with Captain Picard, slumming with the Enterprise and Roddenberry’s flying UN, endless cups of Earl Grey, that taste of bergamot, bergamot a brand, a memory you wish you’d forgotten along with Tribbles and troubles, Q means a question, it means Ramona Quimby and her opinions on the Davy Crockett tail you dash at the center of an O, so close to a number two, Q means you’ve been compromised, corroded, tricked, taken hostage, Q means you’ll pay a jacked-up price for a crappy hotel room in DC, expecting to see Neptune a blue tourmaline on the horizon instead of the moon, Q means you’d never believe this, you’d never read this, you have someone you love who cannot understand where you went when you were lost
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 Oberon, 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 and the 2020 Beullah Rose Poetry Prize. She was doubly nominated for the 2019 and 2021 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.