Levi Walls

“My mom’s smile is genuine,
A lilac beaming
In the presence of her Sun.

Indentions in the sand prove
Time’s linear progression,

Her hair yet unblighted,
Carrying midnight’s consistency.

Clear tracks fading as the
Movement slips further
In the past.

Cheekbones
High, soft,
In summer’s hue,
Hopeful.

Each step’s unknown impact,
A future looking back.

My father’s strength:
One whose
Life is in his arms.

Squinting past the camera,
He rests upon a rock
Like caramel corn half eaten,

Just to the left
Of man-made concrete convention

Daylight’s eraser
Removing color to his right.

Dustin sits
In my father’s lap,
Open mouth of a drooling
Big mouth bass;

Muscle tone
Of a well exercised
Jelly fish,

He looks at me
Half aware;

His wheelchair
Perched at the edge
Of parking lot gravel grafted
Like a scar on nature’s beach,

Opening to the ironic splendor
Of a bitter tasting lake.

I took the picture.

Age 11.

Capturing the pinnacle arc
Of a son
To my lilac
Who
Outlived him and weeps,

Still.

Their sky has staple holes –

Maybe that’s how the
Light
Leaked out.”
― Darcy Leech, From My Mother

“I think of us standing in the water, hands clasped, making that promise to come back if it ever started again—standing there almost like Druids in a ring, our hands bleeding their own promise, palm to palm. A ritual that is perhaps as old as mankind itself, an unknowing tap driven into the tree of all power—the one that grows on the borderline between the land of all we know and that of all we suspect.”
― Stephen King, It

“Your left! Your left! Your left-right-left! Your left! Your left! Your left-right-left! Yeah, yeah, yeah. I left. I left. I left-left-left that wack school and that even more wack ROTC drill team because it was Friday, which to me, and basically every other person on Earth, meant it was time to party. Okay, maybe not everybody on Earth. I’m sure there was a monk somewhere on a mountain who might’ve been thinking of something else. But I wasn’t no monk. Thank God. So for me and my friends, Friday was just another word for party. Monday, Tuesday, Hump Day (because who can resist the word “hump”?), Thursday, and Party.”
― Jason Reynolds, All American Boys

“The wheel of fortune lifts us up and brings us down. You must free your happiness from its vagaries. Expect nothing, and everything is a gift.”
― Phil Tucker, The Path of Flames