Today, I read about a mother bleeding
mysteriously from her vagina
not quickly, but enough to stain,
something dark inside, and
when the gynecologist found it,
attached to the slick muscle
by its two suckers and tugged it free,
and it kept bleeding for hours, I thought
about how leeches, too, are mothers,

how I once spotted one, undulating
through the shallows
of a New Hampshire pond,
a stripe the color of leaf litter
down her rippling back, and at her side,
a wriggling cloud of S’s—a tiny school
of leechlets. When I reached out my net
they ducked beneath her awning
and disappeared.

Host dearest, what do little white boys take?

Back at the lab, I scraped her
from the bucket wall,
into a vial of ethanol. She writhed,
shrank in seconds
to a close parenthesis, stiff enough
to roll through the swirled preservative
onto her back, revealing
a small cluster of petals
clinging to her underside—
an umbilical flower
of dead children.

Eben E. B. Bein (he/they) is a biology-teacher-turned-climate-justice-educator at the nonprofit Our Climate. He was a 2022 Fellow for the Writing By Writers workshop and winner of the 2022 Writers Rising Up “Winter Variations” poetry contest. Their first chapbook Character Flaws is out with Fauxmoir Lit and they’ve published with the likes of Fugue Literary, New Ohio Review, and Columbia Review. They are currently completing their first full collection about parent-child estrangement, healing, and love. He lives on Pawtucket land (Cambridge, MA) with his husband and can be found online at ebenbein.com or @ebenbein.