Echo Discusses Desire with the Trees

← v20n2, Fall 2021

Surely you covet

things beyond your reach. I see

how you pivot toward the sun’s

blithe face, compete like schoolgirls

for its gaze.

Even your roots, insatiable.

Your foundation: a snarl

of pushy tongues.

But you stand around like gossips and view me

hostile. You shiver

as I pass, refuse me refuge.

Of course I wanted

what was denied to me, of course

I withered from its lack—

My need offends you

in its clarity. Even now, you yearn for any

wink of sun through the haze—

and the clouds themselves,

swollen with rain.

myth desire nature

Leila Chatti

Leila Chatti is the author of the poetry collection Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), which won the 2021 Levis Reading Prize, and the chapbooks Ebb (Akashic Books, 2018) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya (Bull City Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic , The Nation , The New York Times Magazine , POETRY , and elsewhere. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including a Pushcart Prize, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Cleveland State University, where she was the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing and Editing. She teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is the Mendota Lecturer in Poetry.