In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • While You Are Shaving, It Rains, and: Upon Realizing There Are Ghosts in the Water
  • Leila Chatti (bio)

While You Are Shaving, It Rains

Outside the window, its similar rhythms. The pane’sbleary vision comforts me; it smooths the edgesof the mountains like time, turns their colossalpeaks to dove-colored smudges. In the next room,

you pull a blade against your cheek so that I mightkiss you. Daily, this mundane risk of affection.The sky undoes itself above the house, its satinwhispering pools around us like a dress

slipped off. I admire the silver sheenof this new country, its muted storms and spiredcypresses cloaked in dew. You rinsein its water, hard and foreign. You run your hands

along your throat. I have come four thousand milesto love you better. Slowly I am learningthe changed climate: brief bursts of rain, and the violent windwhich clears it. [End Page 136]

Upon Realizing There Are Ghosts in the Water

In memory of the refugees drowned crossing the Mediterranean Sea

I should have known but the waternever told me. It sealed its blue lipsafter swallowing you, it licked my ankleslike a dog. I won’t lieand say the ocean begged for forgiveness;it gleams unchanged in the sun.Some things are so big they take and takeand remain exactly the same size.Darkness is like this; grief too. I cryand the ocean slips from me—all alonga little sea roiling inside with its ownsad phantoms. For a summer I soaked inits green warmth, wore its salt like gemstones.Now the heavy shame: how I waded into your grave as if trying it on,how, when the waves came,they gave me back. [End Page 137]

Leila Chatti

LEILA CHATTI is a Tunisian-American poet. The recipient of a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center, a scholarship from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, and prizes from Narrative Magazine’s 30 Below Contest and the Academy of American Poets, her poems appear in Best New Poets, Narrative, North American Review, the Missouri Review, TriQuarterly, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere.

...

pdf

Share