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After Touching You, I Think of Narcissus Drowning

Leila Chatti

How desire is a thing I might die for. Longing a well,
a long dark throat. Enter any body

of water and you give yourself up
to be swallowed. Even the stones

know that. I have writhed
against you as if against the black

bottom of a deep pool. I have emerged
from your grip breathless

and slicked. How easily
I could forget you

as separate, so essential
you feel to me now. You

beneath me like my own
blue shadow. You silent as the moon

drifts like a petal
across your skin, my mouth

to your lip—you a spring
I return to, unquenchable, and drink.

Leila Chatti is a Tunisian American poet and the author of Wildness Before Something Sublime (Copper Canyon Press, 2025); Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize and the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry; Tunsiya/Amrikiya (Bull City Press, 2018); and Ebb (Akashic Books, 2018).

Themes

About this Poem

“I turned to the myth of Narcissus as a way to understand a man I loved, but the myth ultimately revealed to me at least as much about myself. What interests me about Narcissus is not his vanity, which I think is a mischaracterization, but his desire, an obsessive yearning that is his undoing. I am that kind: one whose desire leads to self-destruction—one who knows this, and still chooses it.”

—Leila Chatti

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More by this poet

I Went Out to Hear

The sound of quiet. The sky
indigo, steeping
deeper from the top, like tea.
In the absence
of anything else, my own
breathing became obscene.
I heard the beating
of bats’ wings before
the air troubled above

Leila Chatti

2023

Still Life with Hemorrhage

A wine crate for a nightstand, and on it, a rose
gone bad in a cup. Its water

a swallow of shadow, murk of rot
and sugar. Clothes sloughed, bodiless, and half-

eaten on a plate,
a plum in its juice. At the center

of the scene: a woman on a mattress
on the floor. Her arms cast out

as if preparing to fly
or as if pinned, savior

or specimen. Still asleep.
Day breaking through the window

a warm leak.
The woman in its spotlight

like a halo. As if something holy,
or at least chosen.

Leila Chatti

2020

The Rules

There will be no stars—the poem has had enough of them. I think we can agree

we no longer believe there is anyone in any poem who is just now realizing

they are dead, so let’s stop talking about it. The skies of this poem

are teeming with winged things, and not a single innominate bird.

Leila Chatti

2019

Poems

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After Touching You, I Think of Narcissus Drowning

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