Sarah Ghazal Ali

Tumulus

—after Leila Chatti’s “Confession”

& weren’t we all once slick girls

in the bath, knees to chest,

thinking of Mary,

effigy of maidenhood?

hunched & afraid, drawn

to the inconceivable latch

of her miracle, the feat of our own

withholding cisterns.

if the flood came, we swore

we would again be good,

better even. if we were spared,

we would harken back, remember

God could stitch life through

a grave. now, carmine weaving

between my ankles days later

than expected, I recall a friend

who refused to let a man touch

her clot before they wed,

who feared God

would curse her with a suckling

of packed sediment, dead

weight in her tomb.

but punishment must be

ancillary to mercy, a scar

rewritten as a sign, something

before which we cower—no,

marvel. O’ Mary, is birth

not its own inhumation,

did your child not emerge

perfectly alive

& written to die?

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Statement of Homage

Leila Chatti’s poetry has been incredibly meaningful to me for the way she renders Islam with care and reverence in a world that tends to privilege the polemical. In reading her debut poetry collection Deluge, I’ve found myself revisiting my own faith as a site of bewilderment rather than mere confusion or frustration. In her poem “Confession” Chatti humanizes Mary in a way I have yet to see elsewhere. Who else has asked what it must have been like for her, just a girl, to bear a child-God? After reading “Confession,” I was inspired to reconsider my own relationship to Mary, to the many times as a young girl when my period was late and I’d wonder if it was happening—if I was going to be “the next Mary.” Often, I’ve struggled to earnestly connect to divine figures throughout history or push a poem beyond a simple prayer. In reading Chatti’s work, I’ve learned what it is to beseech, utterly bewildered, and to carve some kind of answer from the silence that resounds at the end of a poem.

Leila Chatti

Leila Chatti was born in 1990 in Oakland, California. She is the author of the debut full-length collection Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), on the longlist for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award, and the chapbooks Ebb (New-Generation African Poets) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. She is the recipient of grants from the NEA, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and fellowships and scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, The Frost Place Conference on Poetry, the Key West Literary Seminars, Dickinson House, and Cleveland State University, where she was the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing and Publishing. She currently serves as the Consulting Poetry Editor at the Raleigh Review and teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is the Mendota Lecturer in Poetry.

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Mundane History with a line from Darwish

—after Gretchen Marquette’s “Figure Drawing”

Here is a mundane history

of seasons tilting out of February, short

& annually milk-thistled,

of rain that fell merciful upon the waiting

ground. Any misunderstanding in me

of earnest intent, as in, I love

but often what I love is the departure—

of a prayer

from my hands lilting toward God,

His waiting ear

or my beloved who when leaving left 

a note on the counter: I am the one

who saw his tomorrow when he saw you.

Tomorrow promises another March

toward the dream

of communion, Niles Canyon

field mustard assuring me of weeks

past where death kept no place

in my mind. Here I am

living not alone between the old flour mill

& heritage railway. Where to go,

what more to witness

of this final day wilting

before a soon-spring? I touched

a blue gum tree. Endemic

vultures screamed above me,

a signal that something will rot

if not relished before the sun

flees & takes with it

my ordinary, insistent will

to live & leave again.

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Statement of Homage

Gretchen Marquette’s poem “Figure Drawing” stunned me the first time I read it in her collection May Day. It approaches one’s relationship to others, to their own body, and to the gift (and / or burden) of their life with breathtaking clarity. During the pandemic, this poem has taken on even more significance, particularly the notion of a “mundane history.” I ask myself, what breaks the monotony of today, my routine, mundane histories, of the small life my beloved and I are trying to survive and render beautiful day in and day out? There have been many COVID-related losses in our family this past month, and they all led me back to this poem, which to me reads as a coda on grief and healing. Marquette’s poem asks me to sit in my skin and breathe, to marvel at the moment before panicking before what is to come, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. In my homage to “Figure Drawing,” I tried to capture a moment in my mundane history, the final day of February before yet another March. I’m encouraged by Marquette’s work to live with clarity, and to marvel in the gift of my mundane, even when it aches, even when it sears.

Gretchen Marquette

Gretchen Marquette is the author of May Day (2016), published by Graywolf Press, which was a 2017 Minnesota Book Award finalist in poetry. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, Tin House, TriQuarterly, Paper Darts and other journals. While a graduate student at Hamline, Gretchen served as the assistant poetry editor for Water~Stone Review, and has been a first reader for the National Poetry Series. Gretchen is a 2014 recipient of a Minnesota Emerging Writer Grant through the Loft Literary Center. She lives in the Powderhorn neighborhood of South Minneapolis.

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