Leila Chatti

FOR THE BABY THAT IS NOT, IS NO LONGER, COULD ONE DAY BE

I swallow capsules the color of loss
in the stilldark morning. I run under water  
a fistful of blueberries, a kettle 
I watch until it shrieks. My face, 
so I can face it. Dutifully 
I walk, for my health, my heart, to the room 
where I guide others to language 
that feels most strange and true. 
I decipher the ambiguous  
image. I say the unsayable 
thing. I lay bare  
my disorder in order 
to pay for the doctor  
who turns the wand slowly,  
brow furrowed at the screen. 

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, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, 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 Publishing and Writing. 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.
MORE POEMS

  • grace (ge) gilbert