This thing I have looks like a mouth.
(No it is not a mouth, it’s an opening)
A girl once walked into it and became a blackboard
where a geometrical equation of bodies was solved from behind.
My mother puts prayers inside my mouth. To be my guide.
Is she not afraid that I may keep letting out the prayers
till everyone of it is gone? And the guide, should it not best work as a halo?
A boy gave me a microphone one afternoon. He wanted me to be heard.
I screamed Love into the microphone and everyone ran away.
He said it didn’t come out well, that I should try another word. I said Live―
No one ran away but the food that went round was served with bullets.
I left the boy, and everyone around, for the waterfront.
I needed to see my reflection.
My father, a man of a few sentences,
once gave me a bottle of beer and said
I should rinse my mouth with it.
He took me to the balcony:
now that you see clearly,
can you see how the moon is still the sun?
I looked up at the sky and folded with the night.
Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto (@ChinuaEzenwa), 26, is from Owerri-Nkworji in Nkwerre, Imo state, Nigeria. He 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 the Etisalat Prize for Literature, Flash fiction, 2014. He won the Castello di Duino Poesia Prize for an unpublished poem in 2018, which took him to Italy.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. Some of his works have appeared in Lunaris Review, AFREADA, Rush Magazine, Kalahari Review, Palette, Knicknackery, Praxis Magazine, Bakwa Magazine, Strange Horizons, One, Ake Review, Crannòg Magazine and elsewhere.
