ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto (@ChinuaEzenwa) is from Owerri-Nkworji in Nkwerre, Imo state, Nigeria and grew up between Germany and Nigeria. He has a Chapbook, The Teenager Who Became My Mother, via Sevhage Publishers. 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 He won the Castello di Duino Poesia Prize for an unpublished poem. 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. His works have appeared in Lunaris Review, AFREADA, Poet Lore, Massachusetts Review, Frontier, Palette, Malahat Review, Southword Magazine, Vallum, Mud Season Review, Salamander, Strange Horizons, Anmly, Massachusetts Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Spectacle Magazine, Ruminate and elsewhere.
The Poem Says
— after Alycia Pirmohamed after Saddiq Dzukogi
are you a story half told?
A finger stuck in the pocket?
Do I see you as a photograph hung upside down in a room?
Are you a church so small that a man cannot walk into?
This poem is not about grief.
This poem is not something twisted either.
Have I not shared a meal twice in this poem?
Have I not greeted you twice in this poem?
Call me a lover, the girl abandoned in a cinema.
Call me a calf, the one never trapped by a predator.
The poem says — are you a monument,
a birthmark on a memory — the poem
says the road grows into a tree
and birds lift from its branches.
I am not a scarecrow. Or the ghost
trying to solve the quadratic equation of a night.
I have asked the editor what he thinks of my submission.
I have asked my past what it still wants with me.
This poem is not from a diary owned by my mother as young girl.
Have I packed up more clothes than needed for this trip?
It’s so much knowing happiness.
It’s too little knowing sadness. The poem says —
what will it take to know that loneliness Moses knew?
The poem says — Dear Sweet Abraham, father of all nations,
did you inform your wife before sacrificing that boy, Isaac?
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published quarterly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
