44. Complaints

This morning, the flowers in this city
are bitten hard by this city’s hunger.
The buildings whisper to one another
the things they see in the night, and how the night
cuts down everything good in this city.
From my window, I sight this hunger,
walking bold on two legs, pausing at every corner
to smile at children in torn clothes.
I go into my bathroom and wash my body,
and my mirror pokes this city’s history
and the things hidden in my confessions.
Some nights, I drink cheap wine only to taste my own weakness.
But what is mercy in a city that’s always growing hunger?
The radio in my apartment comes on with a news announcer,
again, children go missing. a family
is wrecked by unknown robbers.
A mother down the street is crying,
her young child has been missing for four days
now, and nothing has been done.
I press my ear to this city’s earth,
listening for something that forgives.
The earth answers in syllables of dust.
Above me, the city’s sky stitches itself almost shut again,
blue thread turning into bruises, then into open wounds.
There is a flower in a vase by the window of
my apartment, and it is still blooming, still welcoming
into its petals this city’s oxygen and its horrible, horrible anagrams.
In the petals, I hear its prayers and its supplications
for this city. And I hold onto that little prayer.

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Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto lives in Lincoln, Nebraska. He won the 2018 Castello di Duino Poesia Prize, Italy, and the 2022 Special ANMIG poetry prize, organized by the Centro Giovanni e Poesia di Truiggio, Italy. In 2023, he was a runner-up in the Sparks Poetry Competition, Memorial University, Canada and in the African and African-American Studies Program Contest hosted by UNL’s Institute for Ethnic Studies. He is the author of The Naming (Nebraska Press, 2025) which was a finalist for the 2026 Balcones Prize in Poetry. His works have appeared or forthcoming in Transition Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, Joyland, Oxford Poetry, and World Literature Today.