Black Urban Realism for the Post-Apocalypse

Yishak Yohannes Yebio

Winner of the 2026 Penn Review Prize in Poetry

In the fever dream, Silas and I gargle molten gold,
searing the diaspora right off our tongues until we are smooth,
quintessentially American. We are trying to cauterize
the borborygmi of the ocean still grumbling in our bellies,
trying to tessellate into something that fits. In reality,
assimilation is a jagged spike. A boy lays iron track
across my spine, driving the metal deep into the vertebrae,
clipping the mother tongue like a marred umbilical cord.
He calls this progress, and Mother calls it survival,
but I call it drowning. Christening ourselves citizens
while stoned in the squashed booth of an Ethiopian diner,
shadows oscillating into navy-gloved silence. Stomachs
full of copper coins and tangled lies / pools of sweat-slick
currency. On the Fourth of July, the fireworks bloom
like dynamite-ashed lips. The smoke tastes like forgiveness.
Quickly, I tire of this hunger. Now he calls my mouth
a vessel of empty distances, but no longer do I pick
under my tarred skin for a map. I only glance down
to see the xylem rings of my history atrophying. One day,
I stare Silas in the eye and tell him to keep his pity
because I won’t be his golden boy anymore. Then I run
and run until the hemisphere divorces itself from the coastline,
which is to say I run back to the origin. In my room,
I find the Stranger in my passport photo, choking
on masticated syllables. Proficient in starved and waiting,
he’s yet to answer my questions. Who are you, who are you,
who are you, I ask him. He doesn’t answer. A paper effigy
in a burning house, it is only noon and I already feel myself
fading into the silhouette. And when Mama comes home
from the restaurant at midnight, hands smelling of garlic
and the heavy, metallic scent of old coins, she will just nod
and wash the gold from my throat.

Yishak Yohannes Yebio was the 2024 Youth Poet Laureate of Washington, D.C., and the Arts and Social Justice Fellow at the Strathmore Cultural Institute and Wooly Mammoth Theatre Company. He was nationally selected as an intern at the Library of Congress. His writing has been featured in Diode Poetry Journal, Nowhere Girl Collective, Frontier Poetry, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere.