Full Description
The voices in these poems have witnessed the microhistories of the atypical body, the unusual body, the enjambed body, the chronically ill body trying to navigate space and time, love and displacement. The poems are a forcefield for questions that are at once intense and gripping: when we embody life through disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent body-minds, how do we grapple with love, time, and consciousness? How does the chronically ill body navigate the monstrosities of trauma and displacement? The poems not only play around the idea of body-minds but also center on embodiment as touchstones of description. They are alive to history and the way poetry's memorial practices animate the raw intimacy between the seen and unseen.
The people who populate Chisom Okafor's Winged Witnesses are broken by numerous afflictions and darknesses, but there is a common companionship that binds them, as in a loop. Their voices call out in the wild and their jaded feet drag through lonely pathways, where wild birds dust-bathe by the wayside. There is trauma in these poems, but also light and salvation, and everything that comes between.
Contents
Acknowledgments
First Witness
Cachexia
Some Places Become Homes by Habit
In Another Life, I Am Twenty-Two, Gifted and Curious
Echo-cardio-gram
Animalcules
Teach Me to Shapeshift
Supersedure
Circumnavigation
On Your Second Visit to the Cardiologist
All I Know about an Enlarged Heart Is How to Carry It
Petrichor
Thunderhead
There Are No Synonyms for Catharsis
Woodsmoke
On Breaking the News of My Heart Dysfunction, I Knew We Would Never Be the Same
angina decubitus
On Patmos, the Isle of My Departure
In Light of Saint John's Testimony as Recorded in the Morning Light on the Water Lands of Patmos
Stranglehold
As Heraclitus Steps into Five Cowries Creek the Second Time
I Gift You a Miracle of Pills
Synonyms for Tachycardia
Night
Birdhouse
Hunger, Even in the Face of a Foreshadowing
I Reach Out for My Epiphany as though I Were a River Boy Rowing Softly into the Sunset
Other Witnesses
Old Coffee Shop
Note to Departure
In the Palms of Night
Unlearning the Principles of Displacement for a Body at Rest
Jaded Feet
Otherwise, I Choose to Die Intestate
A Piercing through the Dark
Medical Histories
Memories Are Traitors, They Blurt Out Time
Child of the Sea
Birthing
Throat Song
Telepathy
Lamb of God
There Is No Haloing Attached to These Bodies
The Voice that Comes with the Winds at Nightfall Is a Traveler's, Dying inside My Head
Hymn to the Bowstring
In Telephone Conversation with My Father Where He Enquires about My Marriage Plans
