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.
Chisom Okafor, a Nigerian poet and clinical nutritionist, lives in Tuscaloosa, where he is studying for an MFA in creative writing at the University of Alabama. His poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, the Raven Review, the Hellebore, North Dakota Quarterly, Salt Hill, Sand Journal, the Account, Rattle, and elsewhere.
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
"Winged Witnesses shimmers with an abundance of interiority and grace. With imagination and deep regard, Chisom Okafor reminds us that we are the kin of each other, flowers, song, stars. And so: a flower sprouts in the head and the voice of a boy is 'an undecipherable murmur of expelled rain.' Our bodies written with each other. Each of us 'a story hidden within a story.'"-Aracelis Girmay, author of the black maria and Kingdom Animalia "I am so moved by these poems, their simultaneous awe and grief, the authority and aliveness of the lyric. Chisom Okafor is an incredibly gifted poet, and Winged Witnesses is a wonder."-Safia Elhillo, author of The January Children
