The Shore Interview #52: Yishak Yohannes Yebio

Questions by Ella Flores, Interview Editor

EF: Hi Yishak, what immediately drew me to your work were the different ways each of your respective poems deals with the past. In “Theory of Falling,” the “I” reckons with being told they were “born in the wrong century,” and hearing “not the Earth’s heartbeat / but the sound of graves shifting.” The poem predominantly responds grammatically, by shifting into hypothetical “if I could, I would” modals, then future tense, before settling back into the present. “The Walk Home,” on the other hand, responds to the past more formally, switching from tercet stanzas, to alternating couplets and quatrains, only switching fully to past tense in the final stanza. Reading them now, how does the idea of time play with the known and unknown in your poems?

YYY: In both poems, time isn’t a fixed backdrop. It’s something the speaker is actively negotiating, testing and rethreading to make sense of what can be held and what can’t.

In “Theory of Falling,” the hypothetical modals (“if I could, I would…”) open a speculative space that tries to rewrite inherited realities—war, violence, displacement—into something gentler. The movement into future tense feels like a reach toward an imagined survivability, even if it can’t be fully realized. By the poem’s end, returning to the present is less a resolution than an acknowledgment that the unknown (what could have been, what could still be) will always run parallel to the known (what is).

In “The Walk Home,” time shifts less in grammar than in architecture. The change in stanza form enacts a kind of spatial rearranging, like memory inserting itself into the present moment. The past enters slowly through sensory triggers (the smell of citrus, the sound of collisions) until, in the final stanza, the verb tense fully concedes to it. Here, the unknown isn’t a speculative future but the fluid, unstable nature of memory itself, emblematic of how we can never be sure when it will surface or what it will demand from us.

In both, the known is tactile and immediate, while the unknown hovers in temporal shifts: a century one wasn’t meant for, a childhood afternoon reappearing decades later. Time becomes a medium that blurs the edges between them, making the poems less about chronology and more about permeability. How our past, present and imagined futures keep slipping into each other.

EF: In “The Walk Home,” there is a constant domesticity that the poem revolves around. Many images cycle through the senses, with multiple using synesthesia, like my favorite one: “talc-sweet hush.” What role do you see the domestic space playing in this poem, or in your work more broadly? And are there unconventional spaces or situations that also conjure this “domesticity” for you?

YYY: In “The Walk Home,” the domestic space acts less as a static setting and more as a vessel for holding fragments of time. The kitchen, the smell of citrus, the clatter of dishes—all of these become not just background, but active participants in the poem’s associative movement. Domesticity here is a kind of anchor: it allows the speaker to move between the now and remembered past without losing their footing. It’s a tactile, sensory framework that can absorb both quiet intimacy and sudden memory.

More broadly in my work, domesticity isn’t only tied to the literal home. It’s any space where the body can briefly exhale, where the senses are allowed to arrange the world in familiar patterns. Sometimes that’s a kitchen table; other times it’s a bus seat, a public library aisle, or a friend’s porch at dusk. I find domesticity in moments of shared ritual. The snapping green beans with a relative, mending a shirt in silence, walking home with groceries, whether they happen in a private room or in the middle of a crowded street.

Unconventional “domestic” spaces often surface in my poems as places where care is improvised: like a temporary shelter made of conversation. They’re not always safe, but they are places where the self can briefly locate itself—much like in “The Walk Home,” where the scent of cut fruit stitches disparate afternoons together into a single, livable moment.

EF: I keep finding myself drawn to the title, “Theory of Falling,” for its multi-faceted potency, especially in how it can be applied to individual lines, stanzas, or the whole poem, in multiple ways. Could you tell us some of your favorite applications of this title to specific instances or threads within the poem?

YYY: I love that you noticed how “Theory of Falling” can refract differently depending on where you hold it in the poem. For me, the title works almost like a gravitational field—it keeps pulling different images and gestures into its orbit. The title becomes a prism: falling as violence, as memory, as surrender, as descent into grief, but also as the very motion that allows renewal. It’s less a single “theory” than a set of possibilities the poem keeps testing.

EF: Are there any journals or magazines you’re currently enjoying?

YYY: I’m really enjoying the Nowhere Girl Collective and Frontier Poetry. They’re both great places to read contemporary poetry and they spotlight both up-and-coming and established writers.

EF: Please speak to how two poems in this issue of The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other.

YYY: I really enjoyed Yan Zhang’s “Ars Poetica” and Bethany Schultz Hurst's “Letter to Geppetto, Written on the Back of a Red Lobster Menu.” What struck me in reading these two poems together is how both are wrestling with containment and collapse, though they approach it differently. “Letter to Geppetto” filters that experience through cultural ruin, finding a strange home in the belly of the whale, the mall, the failing Red Lobster—while the street poem is more rooted in close perception, watching how sunlight, dumpsters, and cicadas slip in and out of memory. One leans toward allegory, the other toward meditation, but both ask the same question: how do we live meaningfully inside wreckage, and what does it take to translate the fleeting or the broken into something that lasts?

________________________________________________________________________________________

Yishak Yohannes Yebio was the 2024 Youth Poet Laureate of Washington D.C. and the Arts and Social Justice Fellow at the Strathmore and Wooly Mammoth Theatre. His work has been featured or is forthcoming in Eunoia Review, Nowhere Girl Collective, Inflectionist Review, Delta Poetry Review and elsewhere.