"Prologue | Emporium" by Aditi Machado
"Prologue | Emporium" by Aditi Machado
A haptic lyric; an imagined silk route, tracing networked flows of capital and a language that slowly decomposes. 13 pages. Hand-stitched. Blind impression letterpressed cover with gauzy handmade endpapers.
“Or did I mean history? Did I mean shale?
& of what is it collaged? How does it cohere?
Sudden queries, sudden as vendors, do they sell
fruit, sell textile? I’ve been so exact
I’ve cut corners. O obsolescence, o light brain
sifting the accidental tree, I desire cinema
in a sense all factories sense
the dilemma. Ought I
shove off?”
Aditi Machado is the author of Some Beheadings (2017) and a few chapbooks, of which Prologue | Emporium is the most recent. Other new work is forthcoming in Lana Turner and The Rumpus. She is the visiting writer-in-residence at Washington University in St. Louis and poetry editor at Asymptote.