Yishak Yohannes Yebio

Theory of Falling

Because the world keeps ending without telling us,
I hold a candle to the mouth of every streetlamp,
asking, are you lonely too?
Are you just pretending to be whole?

Somewhere a boy tucks a pistol beneath his tongue
and dreams of a door that will open into rain.
Somewhere a girl rewrites the stars in her diary,
stars that, like her, have been burning themselves clean.

I chew the word mercy until it tastes like my mother’s hands—
small, cracking, full of anything that could be mistaken for light.
Once, she told me, you were born in the wrong century,
but I think I was born in the wrong kind of skin—
the kind that flares too easily under touch,
the kind the sun forgot to name.

I press a stethoscope against the ground and hear
not the Earth's heartbeat
but the sound of graves shifting in their sleep.

If I could, I would climb each century like a staircase,
unlearn every war inside my blood.
If I could, I would unzip my chest
and let the birds nest there,
let them mistake my ribs for branches,
singing whatever songs still remember how to be songs.

You ask me if I believe in heaven,
and I say: only the way the sea believes in drowning,
only the way the match believes in fire.

Tonight, I will walk backwards into the wind,
into the broken television static of the stars.
I will carry every failure like a pocket full of seed.
I will lose them one by one,
hoping they sprout into something too soft to kill.

Because isn’t this how we survive?
By throwing our voices into the well of darkness,
hoping one day it echoes back a little less lonely,
a little more ours?

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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.