These two poems by Yishak Yohannes Yebio trace language across the fault lines of migration, inheritance, and myth, asking how the displaced tongue might transform exile into a new grammar of home….
by: Yishak Yohannes Yebio
Angstrom The July fog thickens with steak-bake fumes, a heavy, grease-slicked veil over Abbeyhill where the modular suits and kilt-clad hips jostle toward the palace gates. We are bloated on light and soggy pastry, hearts spinning like prayer wheels in the traffic, waiting for the polls, or the rain, or a grace that doesn’t feel like a debt. You cradle me in a litany of broken English, spoonfeeding me Tigrinya syllables—noodle-curled, each vowel a crowbar-curl stretching against the sterile, six-panelled windows of the rich. I scrub this bloodline with vinegar while the shopfronts sell sweatshop tartan, and we swallow the radio’s old refrain alongside the sins of our ancestors. The sky threatens us with a discourse of darkening clouds, but our tongues are overfed, heavy with the Sun, eating every language we can get our hands on. Grammar gets stuck in the gums like gristle; conjugations crack open like wet bivalves under the shadow of Holyrood’s stone. I call you Aday, my lips bent into submission, even as the translation turns sour, turning son into something sharper, something bared. If the palace walls should fissure and fall, if the Greggs crumbles and the water dries, let us not retch these graphemes onto the pavement to be lapped up by the stray dogs of history. Instead, let us weave this July light into a net, catching the syllables that refuse to drown in the July heat or the American plunder. Blow before you eat; the truth might burn. But as the taxi driver escapes the angstrom of the hill, may we find a way to breathe beneath the light— beyond the trafficked generosity of the state, holding onto the slant of a name that finally tastes like home.
Yggdrasil, Edenic In the aftercurrents of the Badlands, Ragnarök still clinging to our tongues, I make an open threshold of each mouth, crossing my mother’s jagged ridges. Under the ribbed loam, two genesis stories tangle their tongues. She feeds me sparrows for syllables: consonants calcified at the root, migratory, unspooling between the partitioned worlds of America. Every phoneme is carried across water, a dialect borrowed from salt, from silt, from stone. We trade the syntax of exile for the grammar of arrival, learning how an alphabet can outlast an empire’s fence. Between us, the air ceases its division. The room softens into an altar of vowels where foreign names learn the architecture of grace. Two silhouettes leaning over the kitchen table, unbraiding the distance between American frost and river clay, becoming cadence, concord, epiphany — a strange and stellar correspondence. The breath between our teeth turns zephyr, a common wind moving through grafted branches, stirring the wild mythologies of our youth until every borrowed word sounds like home.
Yishak Yohannes Yebio is a former Washington D.C. Youth Poet Laureate and Arts and Social Justice Fellow at Strathmore and Woolly Mammoth. He is the recipient of the Penn Review Poetry Prize.
