ON LOSS
When the stopped. When
the vanished. Like a dream—the violence of
its ending, the absence of narrative. There was no
language. In the body, the mind, a mouth. Agape. I
tried to write and every word foundered. Agony—
I saw it. The dark inside, which I was and was
not. The undone undid me. All night
the leaving came.
THINGS THE COLOR OF NIGHT
Blackberries. Watermelon seeds. Lunar
seas, seen from here. A bruise woken to
the day after an injury. The unbroken
skin of plums. Unsayable truths in cold
authoritative forms. Where the baby isn’t
in the ultrasound. Eyelashes. Ink. Films
when the story is over. Sleep. Crows.
Mourning clothes. A beetle’s carapace.
Licorice. Tar. Teeth rotten through. Tea
oversteeped. Olives. Jaguars. The infinite
universe. My hair at my birth. Opening in
the eye through which I receive the real
and exterior world. Anything burned no
longer burning. Anything touched by it
once it comes.
LEILA CHATTI is a Tunisian-American poet and author of Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize, the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award, and four chapbooks. Her honors include multiple Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Cleveland State University. Her poems appear in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Atlantic, POETRY, and elsewhere. She is a Provost Fellow at the University of Cincinnati and teaches in Pacific University’s M.F.A. program.