Leila Chatti, Third Place winner in Narrative’s Thirteenth Annual Poetry Contest, is a Tunisian American poet and the author of Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize, as well as several chapbooks, including Ebb and Tunsyiya/Amirikya. She earned an MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University, where she was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize. She is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College and lives in Cincinnati.

The Doe

by Leila Chatti

I drove through the night and still more came,
throwing itself at the windshield.

I could believe the entire world was
asleep, the night
stretching on infinite in either
direction, past


in shadow, future in shadow,
the planet subdued
for a moment and me


alone barreling


through it.
White Beetle and the white fanning
ahead a white moth, a death
moth.
People on couch
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