Deluge
LEILA CHATTI
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This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.
for Patricia
Poems in this book have been published in the following journals:
The American Poetry Review—“Haemorrhoissa,” “Tumor”
Beloit Poetry Journal—“Intake Form”
Boulevard—“Annunciation (My body now a chamber)”
CALYX Journal—“Mary in the Waiting Room at the Gynecologist’s Office”
The Cincinnati Review—“God’s Will”
fields—“Postdiluvian,” “The Scare”
Four Way Review—“MRI”
The Georgia Review—“Annunciation (I have come to accept the story),” “Questions Directed toward the Idea of Mary”
Gulf Coast—“The Blood,” “Night Ghazal”
Indiana Review—“Immaculate or Otherwise”
The Journal—“Etiology,” “Odalisque”
Kenyon Review Online—“Angel”
The Los Angeles Review—“Nulligravida Nocturne,” “Watershed”
Los Angeles Review of Books—“Haemorrhoissa’s Menarche,” “Mary Speaks”
The Massachusetts Review—“Still Life with Hemorrhage”
Mid-American Review—“Deluge (And so it was)”
Narrative—“Exegesis,” “Landscape with Bleeding Woman,” “Sainte-Baume”
New England Review—“Portrait of the Illness as Nightmare”
Ninth Letter—“Prayer”
Pleiades—“Litany While Reading Scripture in the Gynecologic Oncology Waiting Room”
Ploughshares—“Confession”
Poetry Northwest—“Metrorrhagia”
Prairie Schooner—“Eyes Opened, as Gods”
Rattle—“14, Sunday School, 3 Days Late,” “Morning”
The Rumpus—“Annunciation (at the bedside)”
Smartish Pace—“The Handsome Young Doctor, Who Is Very Concerned”
32 Poems—“Morcellation,” “Waking after the Surgery”
Tin House—“Sarcoma”
Tin House Online—“Testimony”
Virginia Quarterly Review—“Menorrhagia,” “Mother,” “Mubtadiyah,” “Storm”
West Branch—“Annunciation (All night I leak a shadow)”
Willow Springs—“Myomectomy”
“14, Sunday School, 3 Days Late” also appeared in the anthology Annunciation (Phoenicia Publishing, 2015); “Immaculate or Otherwise” and “Morcellation” were included in the Orison Anthology for 2017 and 2019, respectively; “Confession” appeared in the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019).
Contents
Title Page
Note to Reader
Confession
Mubtadiyah
Intake Form
Deluge
Mary in the Waiting Room at the Gynecologist’s Office
MRI
Annunciation
Mary Speaks
Watershed
Sarcoma
Litany While Reading Scripture in the Gynecologic Oncology Waiting Room
Menorrhagia
Mother
Tumor
Portrait of the Illness as Nightmare
Angel
Haemorrhoissa’s Menarche
Etiology
Eyes Opened, as Gods
14, Sunday School, 3 Days Late
The Scare
Night Ghazal
Hymen
The Blood
Metrorrhagia
Still Life with Hemorrhage
Haemorrhoissa
Immaculate or Otherwise
God’s Will
Testimony
Prayer
Zina
Nulligravida Nocturne
Morning
The Handsome Young Doctor, Who Is Very Concerned
Morcellation
Landscape with Bleeding Woman
Odalisque (Polaroid Taken One Day before the Surgery)
Annunciation
Myomectomy
Waking after the Surgery
Postdiluvian
Remission
And It Was Said
Annunciation
Storm
Exegesis
Questions Directed toward the Idea of Mary
Awrah
Sainte-Baume
Deluge
Notes
About the Author
Also by Leila Chatti
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Special thanks
From the depths I have cried out to you, O Lord
DELUGE
CONFESSION
Oh, I wish I had died before this and was in oblivion, forgotten.
Mary giving birth, the Holy Qur’an
Truth be told, I like Mary a little better
when I imagine her like this, crouched
and cursing, a boy-God pushing on
her cervix (I like remembering
she had a cervix, her body ordinary
and so like mine), girl-sweat lacing
rivulets like veins in the sand,
her small hands on her knees
not doves but hands, gripping,
a palm pressed to her spine, fronds
whispering like voyeurs overhead—
(oh Mary, like a God, I too take pleasure
in knowing you were not all
holy, that ache could undo you
like a knot)—and, suffering,
I admire this girl who cared
for a moment not about God
or His plans but her own
distinct life, this fiercer Mary who’d disappear
if it saved her, who’d howl to Hell
with salvation if it meant this pain,
the blessed adolescent who squatted
indignant in a desert, bearing His child
like a secret she never wanted to hear.
MUBTADIYAH
(Arabic) beginner; one who sees blood for the first time.
And indeed, appointed over you are keepers, Noble and recording;
They know whatever you do.
the Holy Qur’an, 82:10–12
Hidden in a dim stall as the muezzin called
all worshippers to prayer, I touched privately
the indelible stain. And watched, with a nascent sense
of kinship, the women washing
through the interstice of the door,
their veils slipping off like water, water
spotting their clothes like rain.
I thought the thought only
children and the pious believe, that I was, just
like that, no longer
a girl: th
e blood my summons, blot like a seal, a scarlet membership
card slid from my innermost pocket. I was newly twelve and wise
enough to be frightened. I had read the Book and so understood
my own was now opening, alighting
onto my shoulders like some ethereal bird flapping
briefly immaculate
wings, and understood, too, that I myself engendered
the ink with which, on its pages, my sins would forever be
written (not literally, but
this was how I imagined it, metaphor, as the blood brought
God’s recorders like sharks to me,
menarche a bright flare, a matador’s crimson cape)
—I had not been good
I lived unobserved, my sins not sins
because no one looked. And now,
above like a lamp suddenly
ablaze, God’s reproachful
eye turned my way, a searchlight eternally
searching, and seeing and seeing—
I was as good as I would ever be. In the dark, the ruddy
iris stared back at me.
INTAKE FORM
Doubled for six hours and bleeding, I decide to go to the hospital
only when my boyfriend says How long? Jesus Christ—then puts me in the car, drives to the hospital.
Rate your pain from 0 to 10, 0 being impossible, the impassible
God, 10 being Christ pinned like a monarch, who was unlike all others wounded, who did not die to save you in your version of the story, who endured the suffering of the world and everyone in it and never once asked to go to the hospital.
Seven pains, or the pain sevenfold—pain like the pain of the Blessed
Mother in the desert, of the first mother who passed it on like an inheritance, of my mother—her first—on her back, wailing, in this hospital.
How much blood, would you say? What’s your best estimate, would you say? Would you say it comes constant or in waves? You stayed in the tub, did you say? Did it soak a tampon, did you say? How many tampons, would you say? How quickly, would you say? Is this abnormal, would you say? Is this a lot of blood for you, would you say? Is there any chance you’re pregnant, would you say? Is it possible this is your period, would you say? When was your last period, would you say? Say, is that your boyfriend, I’m going to ask him some questions, okay? I’m just going to ask him some questions about your bleeding, okay? Just clear some things up, okay? Get a clear picture, okay? Then we’ll get you into the hospital.
In the twenty-second year of my life, in the twelfth month, on the fifteenth day of the month, all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened.
And I caught heaven in a plastic bag. Heaven teeming steadily into a bag beneath my jeans. And—God forgive me—I think mulberries. And an angel speaks the measured, anodynic language of angels directly to my vein. And I bob in and out of what divulges no horizon. A voice above pronouncing flood and me affirming yes, a flood. And so, one day, I’ll say it was—the word came down to me so simply that first day of the spate, of the hospital.
DELUGE
And they were oblivious, until the flood came and swept them all away.
Matthew 24:39
And so it was—twenty-two and suddenly
gushing, as if a dam had burst or a thundercloud
deep inside the storm of me, the flood
like a horse loosed from its stable, blood
racing down my thighs, I thought
surely I will die, so much of me
outside of me and still more
leaving, an exodus, the blood
rushing as animals do just before
the worst of it, as they must have
done before the deluge came, those left
behind, as from their homes
the unspared—perhaps one of them
a woman, my age—looked on
with something close to wonder,
unaware of what approached.
MARY IN THE WAITING ROOM AT THE GYNECOLOGIST’S OFFICE
She flips the silken page of a Cosmo
and sucks on her teeth. I watch
her immaculate hands as she scans
sex tips and checks again her phone.
Her veil hangs loosely, ornaments
her shoulders like a fresh drift of snow.
It’s just us two. Across the room,
a watercooler gurgles beneath framed diagrams
nailed to the wall: uterus, fallopian tubes,
a vagina opening its deep
throated rose. Mary presses
her palm to the heat
of her breast, turns to me and says,
as if apologizing, I’m a little nervous.
Carefully she smooths
her blue skirt, glances
at the ceiling. Whispers,
One was enough.
In my hand, an empty cup.
Mary crosses
her legs, fingers the slender
chain around her neck.
She rubs her thumb against
the pendant’s tiny face, his miniature
arms permanently splayed.
MRI
I wear a gown that ties in the back; this is how
I am sure I am sick. The nurse can’t be more
than a few years older than I, smiling
as if we’re friends while I grip closed
the gape of my frock. Lying down
on the narrow carriage, I think
it’s a bit like a grotesque sleepover,
me in my nightdress and the nurse
telling jokes, fetching me a blanket
to throw over my knees. I think
these things because I am young
enough to have slumber parties,
still young enough to feel entitled
to ease. And the nurse waves
to a technician behind the glass—a boy,
I mean a man—who coolly asks
what I’d like to listen to, the way a boy does
on a date, scanning the car radio,
or at a party where he knows everyone
will sing along, but I say nothing
as I slide in, arms by my sides
as if I were slipping into the sleeve of a sleeping bag
and it were simply my friends whispering
in the next room, trying not to disturb me.
ANNUNCIATION
at the bedside robed
in white a white blaze
above
a hum of light
like a supernal
language a dove in the dark
bell of my thresh
-old pain
pealing like a Sun
-day the attending
announcing
shadow
widening the dove’s
steely
beak a bit
of pressure a sharp
pinch
in view on the screen
apparitions
black halos black
seas void
of boats
or divinity
they are speaking now they are trying their best
to appear
human
so I won’t
startle leave but what
they have to tell me
I don’t want
to receive
the Word only
incarnate
once it slipped in her
sleeve
MARY SPEAKS
And what could I say when he entered, rude
as a dream, bare flame of a man with wings and demands
not his own? I’d been raised, a good
girl, to house
my tongue in my mouth, to be hospitable
toward strangers, suspicious of
no one. Perhaps I’d have been
better off
to be wary, but I’d been waiting so long
to hear God speak—I hadn’t thought to think
of what he might tell me.
WATERSHED
The moment was, to the observer (my boyfriend,
and God I suppose, as He is always
watching and we were
otherwise alone), ordinary—February waiting for us outside
settled as a marriage, all dull
secular light and tepid weather, inside the room
a pale green, muted and slightly cool as if under the surface
of a pond, I emerged
from the bathroom still shedding
blood like water, still leaking like a tap, I had changed
into a paper gown, baby blue, with little bows
knotted along my spine, my body spiraled
back, ungainly, distracted, to hold
closed where I was exposed—he said
the nurse left something for me
on the exam table, a couple of white sheets
at the edge, I sank
onto blue plush, the stirrups
gaping to my left and right like two silver mouths,
and then those words, you know, I lifted them
so casually—
SARCOMA
When the doctor says the word sarcoma, I consider how it might be a nice name for a daughter, that good feminine a, the way parents name their children for all sorts of inappropriate things—apples, for instance, or the place where the baby was conceived—and I trace my fingers over the barrow of my belly as he speaks, flesh distended beneath the blue tissue I wear for a dress—an ideal grief frock, throwaway—and he says something about life expectancy but of course I expect my life, so plain I thought nothing would ever take it, and while he explains I cup my palms around my center—as if comforting a child, or covering her ears.