POEM OF THE WEEK: LEILA CHATTI

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Leila Chatti

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Litany While Reading Scripture in the Gynecologic Oncology Waiting Room

 

And God said, let there be blood

And God said, flood

And God said, good

is a woman with fruit

in her womb and not

in her hand

And God said, sin

And God did not say, forgive

And God said, I will make a stormy wind

And God said, son, a breath

stirring

And God said, highly favored

And God said, condemned

And God said, I will blot out man

whom I have created, for I am sorry

that I have made them

And God said, listen

And sunk a boy

in her like a stone

 

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Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of the chapbooks Ebb (New-Generation African Poets Series, forthcoming 2018) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press (forthcoming 2018). She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, Dickinson House, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, where she is the 2017-2018 Ron Wallace Poetry Fellow. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, The Georgia Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, Narrative, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.