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 little things, like the drops of honey in a bottle,
or the dimples found in babies’ hands. Or the last day of a year.
I often walk into a man’s body 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.
–
Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto is from Nigeria. He won the Castello di Duino Poesia Prize in 2018 for an unpublished poem, which took him to Italy. He is the recipient of New Hampshire Institute of Art’s 2018 writing award and 2018 scholarship to the M.F.A. program. Some of his works have appeared in Lunaris Review, AFREADA, Raffish Magazine, Kalahari Review, Palette, Knicknackery, Praxismagazine, Bakwa Magazine, Strange Horizons, One, Ake Review, and Crannòg.