Confession — Blackbird Archive

← v20n2, Fall 2021

Truth be told, I like Mary a little better

when I imagine her like this, crouched

and cursing, a boy-God pushing on

her cervix (I like remembering

she had a cervix, her body ordinary

and so like mine), girl-sweat lacing

rivulets like veins in the sand,

her small hands on her knees

not doves but hands, gripping,

a palm pressed to her spine, fronds

whispering like voyeurs overhead—

(oh Mary, like a God, I too take pleasure

in knowing you were not all

holy, that ache could undo you

like a knot)—and, suffering,

I admire this girl who cared

for a moment not about God

or His plans but her own

distinct life, this fiercer Mary who’d disappear

if it saved her, who’d howl to Hell

with salvation if it meant this pain,

the blessed adolescent who squatted

indignant in a desert, bearing His child

like a secret she never wanted to hear.

religion body gender

Leila Chatti

Leila Chatti is the author of the poetry collection Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), which won the 2021 Levis Reading Prize, and the chapbooks Ebb (Akashic Books, 2018) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya (Bull City Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic , The Nation , The New York Times Magazine , POETRY , and elsewhere. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including a Pushcart Prize, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, 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 Writing and Editing. She teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is the Mendota Lecturer in Poetry.