The Rules

Leila Chatti

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.

You’re welcome. Here, no monarchs, no moths, no cicadas doing whatever
they do in the trees. If this poem is in summer, punctuating the blue—forgive me,

I forgot, there is no blue in this poem—you’ll find the occasional
pelecinid wasp, proposals vaporized and exorbitant, angels looking

as they should. If winter, unsentimental sleet. This poem does not take place
at dawn or dusk or noon or the witching hour or the crescendoing moment

of our own remarkable birth, it is 2:53 in this poem, a Tuesday, and everyone in it is still
at work. This poem has no children; it is trying

to be taken seriously. This poem has no shards, no kittens, no myths or fairy tales,
no pomegranates or rainbows, no ex-boyfriends or manifest lovers, no mothers—God,

no mothers—no God, about which the poem must admit
it’s relieved, there is no heart in this poem, no bodily secretions, no body

referred to as the body, no one
dies or is dead in this poem, everyone in this poem is alive and pretty

okay with it. This poem will not use the word beautiful for it resists
calling a thing what it is. So what

if I’d like to tell you how I walked last night, glad, truly glad, for the first time
in a year, to be breathing, in the cold dark, to see them. The stars, I mean. Oh hell, before

something stops me—I nearly wept on the sidewalk at the sight of them all.

Themes

About This Poem

“I spent much of the last year unable to write. When I tried to listen to my interior, what I heard was a cacophony of accumulated voices telling me what a poem should be, what a poem should do—and, more disturbingly, what it shouldn’t. I began this poem as a genuine attempt to follow the rules I had internalized, but as I wrote the poem, I was interrupted by a strong urge to instead write about something that broke them—I wanted to write about the walk I took the night prior, in Madison, Wisconsin, and the brief, vital moment of joy that indicated my year-long depression might finally lift. I knew this risked sentimentality, earnestness, and vulnerability, things I had been told to guard against, but I was tired of the rules—I wanted to write the real thing, even if it wasn’t the ‘right’ thing. So I did.”
—Leila Chatti

My grandmother's hands recognize grapes, the damp shine of a goat's new skin. When I was sick they followed me, I woke from the long fever to find them covering my head like cool prayers. My grandmother's days are made of bread, a round pat-pat and the slow baking. She waits by the oven watching a strange car circle the streets. Maybe it holds her son, lost to America. More often, tourists, who kneel and weep at mysterious shrines. She knows how often mail arrives, how rarely there is a letter. When one comes, she announces it, a miracle, listening to it read again and again in the dim evening light. My grandmother's voice says nothing can surprise her. Take her the shotgun wound and the crippled baby. She knows the spaces we travel through, the messages we cannot send—our voices are short and would get lost on the journey. Farewell to the husband's coat, the ones she has loved and nourished, who fly from her like seeds into a deep sky. They will plant themselves. We will all die. My grandmother's eyes say Allah is everywhere, even in death. When she talks of the orchard and the new olive press, when she tells the stories of Joha and his foolish wisdoms, He is her first thought, what she really thinks of is His name. "Answer, if you hear the words under the words— otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges, difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones."

Jackhammering Limestone

You ask about the leaves and I tell you it’s been so dry here

the leaves are just giving up, turning brown, falling off the trees,

which all look dead. This might be a metaphor for the election or

might be a metaphor for nothing—it’s hard to say. Each morning

I wake up to machines across the street jackhammering limestone,

shearing away more rock-face and turning it to rubble strewn across

red clay soil so dry it heaves and cracks. It’s been seven weeks of

drilling and blasting, drilling and blasting, and that’s not a metaphor

for anything either except maybe my midlife crisis, which I’m surely

having as there’s whiskey next to me and I’m up all night wondering

if I can be hairless again in some risqué places. Most days I refuse

to believe we’re doomed, despite growing evidence to the contrary.

I mean, it’s like the 1970s down there. Trust me. Most days, I listen

to NPR on my car radio and talk to one son or the other in the back seat

and ask them questions they sometimes answer as we drive home

past the pile of rubble and the leafless trees, which vaguely resemble

the girl I saw on campus wearing an entire shaggy outfit made from

flesh-colored plastic grocery bags campaigning on an environmental

platform for student council president. Her amazing bag-suit was rustling

in the breeze and it looked like she might take flight, just soar over campus

with the drones delivering burritos this week as a test stunt because

our motto here is Invent the Future, which I think about a lot—not as

‘your future’ in the sense of what I wanted to be when I grew up,

which I figured out by process of elimination was not a banker or a

computer programmer, and I never saw myself as a mother either but

here I am. More like I would invent a future where my black son will not

get shot by police for playing in a park, or driving, or walking from his

broken-down car. I would invent a future where there was always

enough chalk to leave notes for the next class: we are starting a revolution

somehow; instructions to follow. What no one told me about programming

computers for Merrill Lynch to keep their front-end trading systems

running past Y2K was that I was simply a dominatrix of code; the disaster

that would take our building down came later, and had nothing to do

with language. My cashier at Kroger has an epigraph on her name badge

under “Paula” that says, “I Will Make Things Right.” I hope that girl

wins her election. I hope that someday someone else will enter my

hairless palace and find it marvelous. The photos of broken glass; the piles

of rubble. The future is throttling towards us and it’s loud and reckless.

Erika Meitner

2017

The hastily assembled angel saw One thing was like another thing and that Thing like another everything depend- ed on how high it was the place you saw Things from and he had seen the Earth from where A human couldn’t see the Earth and could- n’t tell most human things apart and though He hadn’t ever really understood His job he knew it had to do with seeing And what he saw was everything would come Together at the same time everything Would fall apart and that was humans thinking The world was meant for them and other things Were accidental or were decora- tions meant for them and therefore purposeful That humans thought that God had told them so And what the hastily assembled angel Thought was that probably God had said the same thing To every living thing on Earth and on- ly stopped when one said Really back but then Again the hastily assembled angel Couldn’t tell human things apart and maybe That Really mattered what would he have heard Holy or maybe Folly or maybe Kill me

Poems

The Rules

More by Leila Chatti

After Touching You, I Think of Narcissus Drowning

Still Life with Hemorrhage

I Went Out to Hear

Related Poems

The Words Under the Words

Jackhammering Limestone

The Tree of Knowledge

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The Rules

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