Poetry Contest Winners

Leila Chatti is a Tunisian American poet and the author of Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), as well as the chapbooks Ebb (2018) and Tunsyiya/Amirikya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. Second Place winner of Narrative’s Tenth Annual Poetry Contest and a Third Place winner in the Eighth, she earned an MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University, where she was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work is also included in Best New Poets, 2015. She lives in Cleveland, Ohio.


THIRD PLACE WINNER


Muslim Girlhood

by Leila Chatti

I never found myself in any pink aisle. There was no box for me
with glossy cellophane like heat and a neat packet of instructions
in six languages. Evenings, I watched TV like a religion
I moderately believed. I watched to see how the others lived, not knowing
I was the Other, no laugh track in my living room, no tidy and punctual
resolution waiting. I took tests in which Jane and William had
so many apples, but never a friend named Khadija. I fasted
through birthday parties and Christmas parties and ate leftover tajine
at plastic lunch tables, picked at pepperoni from slices like blemishes
and tried not to complain. I prayed at the wrong times in the wrong
tongue. I hungered for Jell-O and Starbursts and margarine, could read
mono- and diglycerides by five and knew what gelatin meant, where it came from.

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