Today is Poetry at Work Day, so we invite you to uncover the subliminal in your typical day to day. Looking to one’s environment, upbringing, and ancestorial ties for reinvention is what Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto does in his poetry collection The Naming (Nebraska, 2025).
With these two poems as a guide, join Ọhaeto in his journey to explore the movements, excesses, and extremes of existing as a postmodern individual, connecting these experiences to ancestry.
Excerpt: The Naming
What I Said to God, Chukwu Ọ̀kịké
God touched me.
And I said: I want to know
where it hurts the most
so I can take care of it;
it’s been a while now
something good happened to me.
I tried to pray, to read my lobes of kòlà, to
show how my body could stretch again.
Sometimes, one has to lose
to understand oneself, you know?
Nobody wants an amateur.
Not even God. Not even you, Nwanne m.
I seek the underside of progress
for the many months my bed couldn’t piece
me together like a jigsaw puzzle.
I was not born for this gloominess I carry.
I hold the day because it saw the night.
Then, I touched God’s nose, and there
was laughter nestling on my palms.
Then I said: I did not come to you by chance,
let this strangeness not stamp me out of your eyes.
A Page from Chinụalụmọgụ’s Diary
This thing I have looks like a mouth.
No, it is not a mouth, it’s an opening.
My mother puts prayers inside my head. To be my guide.
A young man gave me a microphone one afternoon.
He wanted me to be heard.
I screamed Love into it and everyone ran away.
It didn’t come out well, he said. Try another word.
So I said Live—
No one ran away. But everyone stared
into one another’s eyes, questioning the torn
sandals left behind by lovers and the monkey’s hand.
I left the young man and everyone around for
the waterfront to see and weigh my reflection.
Once, my uncle gave me a bottle of beer
and being a man of a few sentences, he said:
rinse your mouth with it. Thereafter
he took me to the balcony,
Now that you see clearly,
can you see how the moon is also the sun?
Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto is from Ishiowerre, Owerri-Nkworji, in Nkwerre, Imo state, Nigeria. He is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and the author of the chapbook The Teenager Who Became My Mother. His work has won multiple awards and has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Frontier Poetry, Palette Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, Malahat Review, Lolwe, Southword Magazine, Vallum, Mud Season Review, LitMag, Colorado Review, Salamander, Oxford Poetry, and the Republic.
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