Deluge — Blackbird Archive

← v20n2, Fall 2021

And so it was—twenty-two and suddenly

gushing, as if a dam had burst or a thundercloud

deep inside the storm of me, the flood

like a horse loosed from its stable, blood

racing down my thighs, I thought

surely I will die, so much of me

outside of me and still more

leaving, an exodus, the blood

rushing as animals do just before

the worst of it, as they must have

done before the deluge came, those left

behind, as from their homes

the unspared—perhaps one of them

a woman, my age—looked on

with something close to wonder,

unaware of what approached.

body illness religion

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.