“Butterfly”

Creators of Justice Award 2020 | First Prize: Poetry

Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto is from Owerri-Nkworji in Nkwerre, Imo state, Nigeria and grew up between Germany and Nigeria. His works have appeared in Lunaris Review, AFREADA, Poet Lore, Rush Magazine, Frontier, Palette, Malahat Review, Southword Magazine, Vallum, Mud Season Review, Bakwa Magazine, Salamander, Strange Horizons, One, Ake Review, Crannòg Magazine, and elsewhere. Find him on Twitter: @ChinuaEzenwa.

I have worshipped all my fears enough.

I have grown tired of looking 

into my dreams for some lessons.

I have learnt how to touch myself 

to see that I recognize love whenever 

God speaks to me in falsetto.

During the last harmattan, my sweats rolled down like beads 

and turned me into breadcrumbs by a twisted road,

like a loaded train wounded by the roadside ―

little cuts for the things that should have healed naturally.

I have learnt how to walk in and out of people 

without leaving a dark thing behind. 

Not even silence.

And the way I do take happiness into my heart 

makes the moon think me a shadow homed in a corner.

I am sorry if I have opened a big window 

to a very big compound. 

There is a cradled child inside of me.

And my father often offers me a coffee in my dream,

and teaches me how to write grief from the middle.

Maybe I should tell of my worries and 

how their words fold away before I can say them.

I have a brother, who kicks me and says I’m delicate

like a china-ware, 

like an over-ripped paw-paw. 

And the sadness I carry often re-arrange 

and maul me into smithereens:

reflections I thereafter fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.

Boys like me my brother also says are never 

strong enough for this world. 

I look at the mirror and my smiles 

learn the amniotic push on my body. I hold on to it. 

My way of surviving anything that comes at me reversed. 

My way of becoming a butterfly in a sea of thorns.

―after reading Nome Patrick Emeka & Jeremiah O-Agbaakin