The Thirtieth Year
after Lucille Clifton
I had expected
to be an ordinary woman.
Dreamed of daughters, beauty, life made
whole by them. Then
the year of losing came, the year I died,
like the trees, again and again.
My sadness plain and always.
A shining blackness in the mind.
I was and was and being
became harder. And I lived
(as if it were ordinary)
years like this.
The Moment When a Feeling Enters
after Adrienne Rich
the body
is political. Speaking true the body’s
suffering made for me a life.
A house. Marzipan. Doctors who see my body
clear. But I don’t like the heavy feeling
of their eyes. Under them I flatten. I close. My mind thinks the body
difficult, so mostly it floats. Half terror,
half beauty, like a ghost. In the body
of night, every night, the absence of me
grows dark as pupils. My body
rises into dream where it can’t be
touched—and I’m air, rootless, everything and nobody.
\
I thought, I thought, and wrote
it down. I thought the writing
would change something; it changed
myself. Which, again, I write.
At the edge of sleep, I knock on the night
to let me in. To reach into, under, my self. To write
the true, forbidden thing I do not know
I know. I see only black; I watch it spark. I write
what the dark makes audible. A dream speaking
what’s inner. Dark as ink in which it is written.
\
Pain made me forget
most things. Mostly my self. Blue, I forgot
to look for, filling the trees. Clouds. Flowers
parading along the pavement. I forgot
dew and dawn and the wind
making language of the grass, forgot
leaves, the gauze of early light under,
and spiders, floating, their webs like seams of air. All forgotten—
keys, instructions, years gone, days sliding
into days like water the sea. Pain made me forget
I go on living. Deathtouched, changed, but my life arrives again
at yet. It’s May. I wake to it, thick and sweet as honey I’d forgotten.
Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of Wildness Before Something Sublime (Copper Canyon Press, 2025) and 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. Her honors include multiple Pushcart Prizes and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches in Pacific University’s M.F.A. program and lives in Cincinnati.