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.
Description
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