He cracked an egg on the pavement, said:
That’s how you summon the sun.
Two yolks slid out, twin hearts
spitting steam on concrete.
I laughed. He didn’t. He had
a toothpick grin, tangerine eyes,
spoke only in upbeats. Whistled
through his molars like a cracked flute.
We played cards in a laundromat
with rules he invented as he went.
Every joker was a prophecy.
Every ace, a door left open.
He told me hope is a body
you drag out of floodwater—
slick, shivering,
still breathing.
He wore joy like a scabbed leather jacket.
Slicked his hair with rainwater.
When I said I couldn’t dance,
he kicked a boot through the ceiling.
Stars leaked in like broken neon.
He said: Look. You already are.
I tried to tell him about all my endings.
He folded them into paper swans,
set them floating
in the oil-spill river.
You see? he said,
grinning with the full weight of it,
Everything wants to live
a little longer.
Yishak Yohannes Yebio is 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 previously appeared on the Nowhere Girl Collective, the Eunoia Review, and the Inflectionist Review.