Portrait of an Autoscopic Epiphany

By Precious Chidera Harrison

November 17th, 2023, after an accident at CKC flyover, Port Harcourt in Rivers state, Nigeria.

I

After the incident, I awoke partly outside my skin,
cowering and teetering on the brink of light.
Straddling the edge, I leaned against the ledge
of a limbo: one leg flailing in the wind, the other
gasping, like a drowning bird, inside my blood.
My voice evaporated like water from my body
and all the watermarks on my heart fizzled out.
Green beams of light ascended from my skin
and floated like a pallid cloud above the scene.
I stood outside myself, watching my body,
a mannequin, almost breathless, as a ghost
sprouted slowly on the fringes of my appendage.
And as if the light once aching in my bones
has been suddenly uprooted from my body,
I became hollow, wrung out of every ray of light.

II

It was there from the soft borders of my body
I could see it—a tiny fissure in the carapace.
I will try to tell this story, but words can only
euphemize the violence I survived that day.
Even if I try to chisel out the images in stone,
even if I try to carve out the fears—of a body
almost deflated between the harshness of metal.

I stood chewing shards of glass, regurgitating
and chewing slowly on each image like cud.
And with each clamp of teeth, I felt snowballs
rain down my throat, melting in my belly.
I could hear the shards whimpering in my blood.

Did I tell anyone my thirst for the final light
was as grave as the despair and anguish I felt
groping endlessly down this gloaming tunnel?
I only cried the bleeding wounds on my soles.

III / The Shape of an Unripe Dusk

Death tried to lick my spine clean of light.
It held a gleaming sickle between its fingers
and dared to harvest the light from my eyes.
I wondered why, at noontide, while the moon
was still green, an owl would try to perch on my skin.
I could hear the rumbling in the sky and sense
a conspiracy among a crowd of sullen clouds.
I could hear death's whistling in the wind
luring me slowly towards the seductive glow
of a sudden sunset where my body is this yolk
scuffed on the teeth of jagged metal and concrete.
and almost stumbling into a river of silence, but
we fell at its brink, feeling the cold at our feet.
A blue frost crawled over my skin from our toes.
I could feel a ghost reach out to scoop my voice,
and with its large palms, it tried to knead
my soul into the vague shape of an unripe dusk.
I reached out with my heart to retrieve my voice.
and I could almost touch the horizon with my heart.

Biography

Precious Chidera Harrison is a Nigerian writer and artist. His poetry explores themes such as love, memory, and existentialism. He was an honorable mention in the inaugural Rhonda Gail Williford Prize. His poems have been published in Arts Lounge, NWF Journal, Brittle Paper, and FERAL.