wildscape. literary journal

An Autopsy of Light
by Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri

                                       &&
                         Sickness is a kind of mirror. You learn to watch it watching you,
                         Freud would call this hunger, but the doctors call it scan.
                         I see myself glowing from the inside out…a radiance that wants to eat itself.

The room hums, sterile, white, full of soft machines
pretending not to stare. I’m still learning
how to pose for the cameras of mercy.
Even the nurse, kind-eyed, tries not to flinch
at the screen’s quiet bloom: a secret garden
of cells rehearsing their rebellion.

What do you call the voyeur who watches his own decay?
A scientist? A believer? A fool?
I think of saints touching their wounds for proof,
each incision a shrine to curiosity.
The body insists on spectacle: the ribs,
the hush, the faint applause of blood.

And somewhere, behind all this,
a poet takes notes in the dim light.
He believes he’s documenting healing,
but he’s only perfecting a metaphor.
In my name, they build new languages of pity,
they hang the scans in galleries of sympathy,
where I am never cured,
only beautifully examined.

The IV drips like slow confession.
My veins learn transparency.
The lens blinks. The screen breathes.
Somewhere a student calls this art.

                                                                     &&
                                                         but, I keep the images,
                                                         black-and-white ghosts in plastic sleeves.

As everything from the body
beckons translation into evidence,
into another elegy: are we talking diagnosis now?

Who names what and where?
Observation is a kind of madness,
to measure the soul by its shadows,
to call every shadow progress.

The body is your birthplace,
we’ve established the only truth.
No need to name organs again.
I go looking for thresholds,
for meanings that exist beside pain.
I believe they assassinate that
when they translate us into charts,
into tongues that fail to grieve.

I see: the flesh seduced you into research.
The forms mocked your fragility,
and soon a conclusion was drawn
about your life’s experiment:

He was a patient. A volunteer for what devours him.
He wanted to turn his cells into lyric. He tried to cure
his own vanishing with language.
He named it remission, a softer word for ghost.

He slept. He dreamed and slept.
He kept dreaming,  and somehow, between
one image and the other, he learned to live
inside the watching.

about the author // Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri