Certain Moments of My Small Life

My friend holds my hand somewhere on a hill.

I become that memory of one young man

Lost in a bush rounded by gardens.

I think of every moment the same way

I do not understand the theory of quantum mechanics.

There are some nights I leave my body for the village stream.

My father shares a piece of unfunny jokes with me in my dreams

And I do not know how to tell him about the things he has missed.

As a little boy I was fond of carrying pint of sunrays with me, everywhere.

It was a way I speak to my sister who left after a car pulled

Her away from her body. I’m sorry that I have bothered

You with too many of my memories. I’m sorry

That this poem says everything I have felt in certain

Moments of my small life.

 

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He (@ChinuaEzenwa) is from Owerri-Nkworji in Nkwerre, Imo state, Nigeria and 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 Etisalat Prize for Literature, Flash fiction, 2014. He won the Castello di Duino Poesia Prize for an unpublished poem, 2018 which took him to Italy.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, Whale Road, One, Ake Review, Crannóg Magazine and elsewhere.