Snow cracked beneath

our feet like glass.
Your beauty agony

prepared me for.
The meantime

blue. To touch
then release

your mouth was an achievement.
Silence lucid. The trees.

We laid in cold
our bodies

vanished.

—

Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College. She is the author of Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize, the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award, and four chapbooks. She is the recipient of grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, multiple Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Cleveland State University, and her work has appeared in POETRY, New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Atlantic, and elsewhere.