Riverless

Issue 15 | Winter 2025 | Joemario Umana, Swan XVII

 

I don't know the definition of man but I know I'm becoming something

the way fire eats wood, slowly and without permission. Maybe this

is what becoming is: a kind of bleeding rehearsing its shape beneath the skin.

They say a man must be riverless, must carry his breaking like tools

and never admit to it. So I hide my petal beneath the soles of my feet,

in the market, in the yard where boys wrestled dust into submission.

I swallow myself daily—mouthfuls of restraint, mouthfuls of hunger.

What is a man if not a boy punished into forgetting? I once saw a boy fall

and rise without wiping the dirt from his knees. They said, that one

will become a man. So I stopped wiping too. The first time I bled,

it was from my knuckles—not from fighting, but from trying

to open a window that didn’t want to let in the light. Tell me,

was that not also a kind of strength? There is a song my mother hums

when she thinks no one is listening—soft, without beginning or end,

the kind that calls something back to life. Some nights I sing it

to my bones, to remind them they were not born only to carry weight.

I’m learning that to be a man is also to be the firewood,

to crack open in the heat and still hold flame. Not for glory,

but to make room for light. I want to believe that even fire,

if asked kindly, can become light.