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.

From Deluge

by Leila Chatti


Landscape with Bleeding Woman

  after Simon Jordaens’s Christ Healing the Bleeding Woman

The clouds’ batting overhead
like a gauze-swaddled seam, dirty cotton.

I see nothing as it is anymore; since


remembering my body as temporary, I impose it
anywhere it fits.
People on couch
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