As within the raucous meditations of high priests you find yourself moving and trepidatious and in the far black moving black trees. For once when I say you I mean you, the morphology pristine. You may not think there is anything particular to you but you may also not think. Somehow volume is more believable when the leech makes love to you when you deplete. Many days go by undoing the central leitmotifs of your life. You have no nature, only wilderness. This is what it is like may not be said. This is what it is not like neither. You take your apophasis and your deliquescence and when it rains like this you have felt everything. Petrichor, petrichor, you call, wishing for a way to always be seed.

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Aditi Machado‘s first book of poems is Some Beheadings. She also translated Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia and edits poetry-in-translation for Asymptote.

“Leech Country” originally appeared in Conjunctions: 64 Natural Causes, Spring 2015, and also appears in Some Beheadings, published by Nightboat Books. Copyright 2017 by Aditi Machado.