~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Yishak Yohannes Yebio

After the Tanks

Bleacher boys. Paper routes. Bukowski, Tesfaye, Morales, Kim.

Their laughter light as the scales of the koi

my mother smuggled from a Chinatown market,

slipping gold into the backyard pond,

where they swam like they belonged—

where my chicken-boned arms never could.

I was half-wind, half-rust,

fitted with sneakers too tight for running,

a name too sharp for whispering.

I spent my summers scraping gum off sidewalks,

watching the others skim like skipped stones

across the surface of something seamless, something whole.

After graduation, I left for the city,

where my voice lost its salt,

where the river stopped knowing my name.

Months later, I read about Tesfaye,

a face familiar from someone else’s yearbook,

folded into a column of black ink and bad decisions.

This morning, his mugshot on a glowing screen

pulls me back like a net, back to parking lot corners

and hands curled into the shape of pocketknives.

Back to the pond, where the koi still rise

when the light hits just right—

where something golden still pretends

it was meant to be here.

Eulogy of a Passing Crow

Teach me

how my mother held silence like a blade,

how she folded her voice into linen,

creased and smoothed, pressed between

the pages of a book she never finished.

She peeled oranges with her teeth,

let the rind curl like a loosened noose,

told me hunger was a thing that should be swallowed whole,

never chewed, never questioned.

She kept her grief under her tongue,

spoke only in the language of weather:

thunder meant she was tired,

rain meant the past was knocking.

My mother tells me

she has been many women,

that she has worn her name like a coat two sizes too big,

let it drag in the dirt behind her.

She tells me love is an exile,

that she has prayed in languages

that never made it past her lips.

I watch her light a cigarette,

the ember flaring,

and wonder how much of her is smoke.

She says she does not fear death,

only the mirrors that remind her she is still here.

She tells me she does not dream,

but I have seen her whisper in her sleep,

calling out to something she has long buried.

When she is gone,

I will try to piece her together

from the ashes left behind.

I will press my ear to the silence,

listen for the ghosts she never named.

I will ask them what they knew of burning.

Yishak Yohannes Yebio was the 2024 Youth Poet Laureate of Washington D.C. and the Arts and Social Justice Fellow at the Strathmore Cultural Institute and Wooly Mammoth Theatre Company. He was nationally selected as an intern at the Library of Congress. His writing has been featured on the Nowhere Girl Collective and the Eunoia Review.