Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto

Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto (1992) (@ChinuaEzenwa) is from Owerri-Nkworji in Nkwerre, Imo state, Nigeria and grew up between Germany and Nigeria. He has won the Association Of Nigerian Author’s Literary Award for Mazariyya Ana Teen Poetry Prize, 2009; Speak to the Heart Inc. Poetry Competition, 2016. He became a runner-up in Etisalat Prize for Literature, Flash fiction, 2014. He won the Castello di Duino Poesia Prize for an unpublished poem, 2018 which took him to Italy. He was the recipient of New Hampshire Institute of Art’s 2018 Writing Award, and also the recipient of New Hampshire Institute of Art’s 2018 scholarship to  MFA Program. In 2019, he was the winner of Sevhage/Angus Poetry Prize and second runner-up in 5th Singapore Poetry Contest. Some of his works have appeared in Lunaris Review, AFREADA, Poet Lore, Rush Magazine, Frontier, Palette, Malahat review, Southword Magazine, Vallum, Knicknackery, Bakwa Magazine, Salamander, Strange Horizons, One, Ake Review, Crannòg magazine and elsewhere.

 The Teenager Who Became My Mother

                                         ― after a teenage mother during the Boko-Haram raids

The teenager who became my mother

had a way of feeling, seeing and hoping. It was her inside

that rafted us through the blood orange fire that seized into the skies.

 

She had a black-rimmed skin

that shimmered as coal, ruin and bronze masks:

a cascade with the waters falling asleep in a sun.

 

She was not one-eyed or one-lipped, but wet with rivers’ hems.

Her hairs were strands of broken happiness and loneliness.

Her viscera ― patient as hope and plan.

 

and each of the scars at her back was a memory.

 

When I asked if she saw anyone die during the raids,

she moved her head up and down. She said Borno, Barma, Yobe.

 

She said she saw five, twenty, even more;

that some of them drowned inside of her; that

everyday survived was accosted by gunshots behind the ricks;

 

and that the thing anyone didn’t want to become was a target…

 

I looked into her eyes, after she had handed me

the geometry and shape of her memories in cones,

and saw the teenager who became my mother:

 

she was a graveyard 

who drowned inside of her

to see us not look anything like the cities of smoke.

 

In One Sentence

―what a girl from Gwoza said (2015)

 

In my sleep god says I do not wear my body well.

He knows I’m running from it just as home has been running from me.

There’s a thing about the body and home that we sometimes forget.

It’s like constant in equations and formulae.

The last time I was asked where I come from,

my whole body trembled like a cracked glass about to shatter.

I was reminded of deaths and home in one sentence:

in that manner you see a closing fist, or

feel on the skin the biting sting trailed by a paper edge.

Home is become where I do not know how to pronounce.

It forces itself in between tooth gaps and conversations.

When I hear its anthem, I remember my childhood

when I played in my dreams instead

as playgrounds had turned into beds for grenades and shells and shrapnel.

Then blood gurgled down the corners, the streets, into the rivers.

Perhaps, it’s why I carry palaces of memories with me, everywhere.

And people, they say, build palaces so they will never forget their past.

They say home is a truth stranger than fiction.

I do not want to believe. I do not want to believe.

I wake up each morning and search the day

to understand what a home really is,

as mine denies my body its meaning

and drags me by the heels off its stomach,

and says I cannot lick the bones blasting in its fire.

 

 

 

Stories I Can’t Tell With My Mouth

people give you bread

and give me poison and traps

                                               -rat says to bird

 

To become a flower, you have to first learn

how to love certain things, like those drops of honey left behind in a bottle,

or the dimples found in babies’ hands. Or the eve of the last day of a year.

I often walk into a man to see how he likes the things he likes;

 and my mother does not know this part of me.

She thinks me a sprout in her garden,

a blemish on a skin. She hears me say my prayers daily, but

does not know the things I say with the prayers,

 the things I do not want to become.

I want to smell God’s body to know what it’s like to be a God.

I have legs, two chewing sticks God gave me,

to tell the ground stories I can’t tell with my mouth.