Assistant Editor Haley Crigger: What do we think about when we think about the moment of our near-destruction, the day we “learned pain” and its “frantic dance”? There is no one way to tell it, but Onyekwelu’s “Telling It” made me gasp aloud in a quiet library. What begins as a meditation on the scars on the speaker’s back, where “every lump is / holy,” becomes a portrait of unfathomable pain in equally unfathomable grace.
Telling It
Scars are nothing more than
a body’s way of recalling.
On my back, every lump is
holy. The ovals & the
square, the thick stamping
of an L into brown flesh.
Once in church, I watched
a thurible smoke & recalled
suddenly the day of my
sizzling: By a swing, our
old playground emerges,
bright with December’s obtuse
moon. Tonight the kids
linger. Kpumgbo or koso or
dodging ball—whichever game,
it’s now blurred out. But in
this memory my happiness
could fill a room. I stand—
the little me—motionless
as coneflowers in summer
until a boy twice my age
picks me out. How he must
have thought of pruning
on first-sight. Of secateurs
& defoliant sprays. In many
ways even plants submit
to butchery. Vulnerability
or trust, that is where my
burning begins. O shimmery
scars the size of mischief,
I still wonder why a child
would try to set another child
on fire. What small hand has
all my infant blood?
I learned pain the way you
learn a frantic dance. The
way it glowed from my inside
out—had you been there—
you’d mistake me for
something more capable of
luminance than of
becoming ash.
Chiwenite Onyekwelu is the author of the poetry chapbook, EXILED, forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks (2023). He was recently longlisted for the Writing Ukraine Poetry Prize 2023. He was also a runner up for the Foley Poetry Prize annd the Anita McAndrews Poetry Award 2022.
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