Deluge Read online

  Deluge

  LEILA CHATTI

  Note to the Reader

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  Thank you. We hope you enjoy these poems.

  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

  Annunciation

  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

  all my life but until this first vermilion drip

  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.