Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto
The Things We Are Not Often Allowed To Talk About
My cry was the first music I heard after I was born.
There are cognate scents for the things I’m trying to understand.
I’m a boy who bears moths and stars in his palms, ready to match
his scars with names of flowers open to agree that each
line in a composition is a lens into his fears and progress.
It burns my heart to watch how everything is turning out now.
I know the heaviness that comes with losses.
When I remember my father, I imagine
the memories of him I have shelved inside of me.
Our faces carry a world of worries cloaked with curtains.
When I stand by people’s shadows, I only want to dissolve and be embraced.
Can there ever be enough sun rays in the gathering of reflections?
This is the first poem I have written in months.
And I understand how much you want to ask if it matters.
We often tend to miss the little things that
hold us together. We often tend to forget.
And billboard how many dirty verbs we carry.
Here I can only say that no one-body
is enough without other bodies.
I go to my village river to hold hands with my past.
Because water remembers everything.
When you see me pointing at the moon, all
I’m trying to ask for is the meaning
of loneliness and happiness.
Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto (@ChinuaEzenwa) lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he is pursuing his Ph.D. in English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln with a focus on creative writing (poetry). He was runner-up for the Etisalat Prize for Literature, Flash Fiction, in 2014. In 2018, he won the Castello di Duino Poesia Prize, the Eriata Oribhabor Poetry Prize (EOPP), the New Hampshire Institute of Art’s Writing Award, and the institute’s scholarship to its MFA program. In 2019, he won the Sevhage/Angus Poetry Prize. In 2023, he was shortlisted for the Alpine Poetry Fellowship. His full-length poetry manuscript, The Naming, is forthcoming in fall 2025 from APBF. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Isele Magazine, Poetry Ireland Review, Oxford Poetry, Massachusetts Review, Frontier, Palette, The Common, Southword Magazine, Colorado Review, Mud Season Review, Notre Dame Review, ANMLY, The Republic, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Ruminate, and elsewhere.