"Every story has two sides" is said so often that it has gone stale, like a proverb on a classroom wall. Karen Bassey's "Part" takes that tired phrase and asks what actually happens to the side nobody hears. She doesn't argue the point. She asks question after question and lets the discomfort build.
The opening sounds almost childlike: "How is it so". It reads like someone puzzling aloud rather than composing a statement, and that plainness suits the subject, since the speaker is baffled by something most people have stopped noticing. The first stanza is only two lines long, and its second line sets up a tidy balance: "two parts of every story". The next stanza begins with "Yet", which knocks that balance over. The white space between "story" and "Yet" works like the gap the poem is about, a break between what exists and what gets told.
The key words of the second stanza are lopsided on purpose. "Everyone seems to always know just one" packs three sweeping words, *everyone*, *always*, and the earlier *every*, against the small, stubborn "one". Many people end up holding a single half. The word "seems" is a quiet hedge. The speaker admits this is an impression, not a proven fact, and the admission makes the complaint feel lived-in rather than theoretical.
The most telling move is a shift in vocabulary. In the fourth line the missing half is still "the other part", an abstract piece of a story. Two lines later it has become "the other person". The poem stops talking about narratives and starts talking about someone who is "hurting", a plain word in the present continuous, which suggests the pain is going on now while the story stays unfinished. Between those lines, justice is "put to nothing". The phrase sounds like arithmetic, as if fairness were a sum reduced to zero when one figure is left out.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular beat. The lines lengthen as the questions pile up, and the longest ones, about justice and hurt, seem to run on because the speaker can't stop. There is also almost no punctuation. Not one of the questions gets a question mark, so they tumble out like thoughts rather than polished rhetoric. The only punctuation in the poem arrives in the final line, "doesn't matter, does it?", where a comma and a question mark appear together. That tag question is a trap. Grammatically it invites the answer "no, it doesn't", yet the bitterness of the tone makes the reader hear the opposite. To agree is to admit indifference, and to disagree is to take responsibility for the half-heard story. The poem gives no answer and leaves the reader holding the question.
The title deserves a second look. "PART" is singular and in capitals, which echoes the poem's complaint that we usually get only one. It also sits close to words like *partial*, which means both "incomplete" and "biased". That is the poem's argument in miniature: a half-told story is a slanted one. The word can also suggest things kept apart, the two halves of the story that never meet.
The poem is significant because it is so unspecific. It names no argument, no victim, no villain, and so it fits any situation where one account has travelled faster than the other: a rumour in a corridor, a screenshot of a quarrel, a headline that everyone has read and nobody has questioned. Its few words ask the reader to examine their own habits. How quickly do we settle on the first version we hear, and who pays when we do? By ending on a question, "Part" implies that the answer depends less on the speaker than on whoever reads it next.