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.

From Deluge

by Leila Chatti


Landscape with Bleeding Woman

  after Simon Jordaens’s Christ Healing the Bleeding Woman

The clouds’ batting overhead
like a gauze-swaddled seam, dirty cotton.

I see nothing as it is anymore; since


remembering my body as temporary, I impose it
anywhere it fits.
People on couch
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