Daniel Lassell grew up in Kentucky and lives in Bloomington, Indiana. His first poetry collection, Spit, was selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi as the winner of the 2020 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. He is also the author of Frame Inside a Frame (forthcoming, 2025) and two limited-edition poetry chapbooks, Ad Spot and The Emptying Earth.

Welcome to the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. Daniel, what poems have you brought for us today?

For many years now, my mom has struggled with Lyme disease. It’s a tricky disease, taking many forms — and even trickier for doctors to identify and treat. Here’s a poem I wrote about my experience seeing my mom go through it…

Lyme

Every ending begins with a field.

\\

Mom stems her fingers
with cigarettes, says the smoke
clears a pathway for her lungs.
Breathing has become
a sport for her. Eight years, she says,
and wipes her face,
adjusts her tubing to undo a kink.
How a tick has pierced my family.
With that bright red ring,
set flames around our farmhouse.
Blood, a whisper of bruises.

My family, for years, thought doing
began with seeing a culprit,
those tiny eyes. And finally,
when the doctors did name the cause,
I rejoiced, oddly,
as if towering wheatgrass
had somehow parted, a doorway
from the suffering temple.

\\

No, just another wall—
and outside, the tide creeps near.
In the hospital again, Mom
speaks in an altered voice,
an accent not her own.
Must be the brain. Must be a feasting.
We must keep her, the doctors say,
learning again how to perform
the most eloquent of drugs,
waves moving,
claiming.

\\

Again, the coats. No food.
Screening
then looking at screens.
See the infection. See it.

It sloshes away, a ravenous
puddle expanding, taking with it
sand, grain, flesh—an ocean
quickly then
another ocean.

\\

O what ladder down is the body.
This time, respiratory failure.
Not the oxygen tank, Mom says.
That’s how they hook you.
Her blankets smell of smoke.
Beyond her window, there’s a fire
unattended.

\\

It doesn’t end, this disease.

When the meds reach
their location, cells fester
and spill through organs,
another round.

Mom gets dizzy from the leaving,
the tick that’s become her.

Does a blood-yoked animal ever
sicken, tune to a pulsing
and wonder
if in blood
it’s not blood,
but where the blood goes?

\\

Forlorn. The wicked oars
become anchors.

-----
On the Fellowship of Rabies

Enormous the sick bat, writhing over leaves,
its body tinfoil, eyes rising.

I remember those eyes, even now.

One of my brothers, three years at the time,
toddled to it and lifted it by a wingtip.

When Mom saw his extended arm from afar,
his bitten knuckles, she cried for him to drop

the pitiful creature. Nothing ever dies simply.
My sister gathered a shovel. Dad boxed it,

drove it to a lab, the eternity of science.
Our brother, shot with a long needle, became

the youngest in Kentucky with a rabies vaccine.
The neighbor has been giving him

high-fives ever since. And today, after we
comfort a dying llama, gums pale

and head thrust into air, we shall each
receive the same vaccine,

a disease carried among us,
a simple leaning of water and drink,

the brain
into brain
into heart.

-----
Blood Lungs

A lung brimmed with blood is a shadow
if air can’t pass through
to enter new compartments—

which is me, as I slump in a tepid wheelchair,
my eyelids dizzy music notes, dipped
while a nurse measures my bicep
with a slouched rubber hose.
I ask for air, wishing to carry again
the bronze of a llama farm, a turnip sky.

How did I get here? I remember a leg
squared with my chest. Shears buzzing.
Wool tussled in clumps. Like a gunshot,
spit sprang into another mouth.
So much green on everything.

And it’s everything that teeters between
rage and forgiveness, between the strings
of withheld logic. Two minutes gone,
I wake to a doctor exhaling,
resting away instruments into familiar
walls of being.

You've been listening to the poems of Daniel Lassell on the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.