God’s Own Gunmen

By: Yishak Yohannes Yebio

Look at us: raw-knuckled and reaching, hands unwashed
of salt, heaving our bruised palms toward a sky that don’t
know how to bend. We made a parish out of gunpowder.
We swore by the holy, punctured meat of boys who
learned to run before they learned to breathe, built altars to
the blue-black steel that named us, our skin sudden and
swollen with its own loud reckoning, every ledger of our
youth rimmed in brass, our sweet, stubborn molars
smashed against the razor’s edge.

I loved you best at the hem of our undoing. I believed
your breath could out-shout the sirens—that stubborn,
sweaty symphony of two fools daring the dark to blink.
Our names broke into snare snaps and backbeats. When
you split, you didn’t spill—you offered up whole galaxies
of grit for me to rake across my tongue, the raw horizon
splintering against my gums like a hymn I chewed until it
bled.

Remember how your fingers came for me? Sharp as
hawks, greedy with fever, preaching a frantic, back-alley
gospel. You held the scuffed coin of my face in your palms
like you could rub the bruising out, like mercy was a trick
we could unlearn if we just held our breath long enough.
Meanwhile, the evening dropped down around us—a cold,
iron tarp, the neighborhood air reeking of burnt pennies
and bad prophecy.

Lord, we were baptised in the kickback. We were children
raised at the lip of the bore, dropping our knees on asphalt
to worship the hollow cylinder, shoving our small, ragged
requests into the chamber already cracked, already leaking
lead.

And me? I took what was left of your holler and tucked it
deep behind the rib cage, a fat, red ember hissing against
the marrow—some feral, caged beast eating its way
through the ribmeat just to see the sun. Even now, when
the street goes dead and cold, I catch the scrape of that
throat, that thick, impossible roar: the whole city
unhinging its rusted jaw, hungry and howling, praying us
down into the dark.

About the Author