Yishak Yohannes Yebio

The Walk Home

T finds a sack of clementines
on the walk home. Brings them in,
peel already freckling his thumbs.

I press my nose to the bright pile:
acid-sweet, sharp as first rain.
The kitchen hums.

We simmer broth, stack the dishes,
answer a small ceremony of screens calling our names.
The ordinary tasks get done.

Speak a streetlamp, a fencepost.
Can I stay longer? I ask, half-joking,
the third crooked night this week.

We orbit each other — soft collisions,
clatter of keys, a dropped fork.
The air smells of citrus and soap.

I think of my hands,
the body’s quiet historians.

I remember the crack
of green beans snapped into bowls,
the vinegar tang rising from sidewalks
in July,

the talc-sweet hush of my grandmother’s coats
hanging in a cedar closet.

Whole afternoons then floated loose
like thread, caught only when needed.
Now they return suddenly, stitched
to the cut fruit in my palm.

It was always late afternoon,
always a bowl of something peeled,
and the light staying a little longer
than we expected.

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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.