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Leila Chatti, Third Place winner in Narrative’s Thirteenth Annual Poetry Contest, is a Tunisian American poet and the author of the poetry collections Wildness Before Something Sublime (Copper Canyon Press, 2025) and Deluge, winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize. She earned an MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University, where she was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize. She teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific University and lives in Cincinnati.

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The Doe

by Leila Chatti
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I drove through the night and still more came,
throwing itself at the windshield.

I could believe the entire world was
asleep, the night
stretching on infinite in either
direction, past


in shadow, future in shadow,
the planet subdued
for a moment and me


alone barreling


through it.
White Beetle and the white fanning
ahead a white moth, a death
moth.
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Reader Comments

  • Chatti's poem is so beautiful, the language so simple yet so...
  • Just a lovely poem: I expected a revision of Stafford's Traveling...

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