Issue Twenty-Five - Winter 2015

In the Bassinet

By Elya Braden

At Gymboree,
	my daughter plays
		with a funny girl.
Drunken feet.
	Listing head.
		Stuttering eyes.
Her mother, quiet, gray-haired 
	sits on a folding chair
		on the sidelines,
a bassinet at her feet. 
	Tucked inside a froth 
		of white eyelet, dark hair.
Pretty. Baby? Doll? I approach.
	My foster daughters, she says.
		Robin, she points toward the mat, is two.
And this is Becka, she says, 
	lifting the bassinet. I peek inside—
		thick bangs, lush hair
a sunken face, eyes pinched shut.
	Tiny waxen fingers.
		Becka is four, she says.	
Their parents kept them chained 
	behind the couch, threw them food scraps.  
		No one knows if she’ll wake up. 
Only her hair and nails keep growing.

Elya Braden took a long detour from her creative endeavors to pursue an eighteen-year career as a corporate lawyer and entrepreneur. She is now a writer and mixed-media artist living in Los Angeles and is assistant editor of Gyroscope Review. Her work has been published in Calyx, Causeway Lit, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, Prometheus Dreaming, Rattle Poets Respond and elsewhere and has been nominated for Best of the Net. She is the author of the chapbook, Open The Fist, recently released by Finishing Line Press. You can find her online at www.elyabraden.com

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