‘A Boy and His Leaf’

Finch Fisher is a high school photographer from the Midwest. He most enjoys taking photographs of the sky because it can change in just a few minutes. Finch is a firm believer of taking the time to enjoy whatever beauty life throws at you because you never know when things may change.

A Boy and His Leaf

When the loam and rotting leaves
Beckoned to a child, it could not be ignored

His mother called him in for dinner
And checked his pockets at the door

Fistfulls of sand. Broken pinecones
Colorful pebbles. Desiccated worms

And in his hand, a single, dead leaf
Crisp and pristine as cicadas on bark

The bladed edge curved like a child's smile
Before they realized just how close

Beautiful could be to broken
Or how gently they held something mattered

In all the loam and rotting leaves
It was this leaf that caught his eye

A boy, so young he could not see
The forest for the trees, something

Too vast for a child, when every single thing
One small thing at a time, was his whole world

This, the first leaf he learned to love
With all the gentleness of dirty fingers

His mother, lovingly set his leaf on the shelf
Beside the book she would read at bedtime

She lifted him by his armpits to wash
His hands in the sink before dinner

All the loam and rotting leaves
The forest floor of a child's memories

C.S. Crowe is three crows in a trench coat that gained sentience after eating a magic bean. He spends his days writing stories on a stolen laptop and trading human teeth for peanuts. A poet and storyteller from the Southeastern United States, he believes stories and poems are about the journey, not the destination, and he loves those stories that wander in the wilderness for forty years before finding their way to the promised land.