I CROSS THE LANE FILLED WITH PEOPLE by Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto (Day 13 of KSR 31 Days of Poetry)

I cross the lane filled with people

who think it’s better we forget
about the birds raging our streams.
There are things heavier than just sleeping
over a nightmare. And these― forgetting
our unsolved problems and baking policies
into loose screws― are heavier. I do not want
to be part of a generation that might be tagged waste at a time
when none of us here now won’t have the mouth to explain
how we tried. What hurts more is how
everybody sleeps calmly at night and not bothered about the dark mist
flaunting our progress. I see a group of children playing
close to my house and an emptiness which is like guilt coated by
negligence fills my stomach. I keep wondering if
I am the only one concerned about all the ugly things
that are wearing our faces at will
or is it that I am not just living like the others.
I want somebody to tell me what is real.
Yet I don’t know what I can do without you all.

Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto (@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 He won the Castello di Duino Poesia Prize for an unpublished poem.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 Isele Magazine, AFREADA, Poet Lore, Massachusetts Review, Frontier, Palette, Malahat Review, Southword Magazine, Vallum, Mud Season Review, Salamander, Strange Horizons, Anmly, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Spectacle Magazine, Ruminate, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Lincoln, NE where he is pursuing his Ph.D. in English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln with a focus in Creative Writing (poetry).