Grey Days
after Helen Levitt’s Seven Young Boys It’s black and white, this snapshot I can’t shake off. Young boys, ranging five to eight, I would guess not from height but seriousness, wafer-thin, in smudged shirts ragged as the crumbling curb they idle near. One tyke stands in the garbage-strewn gutter as a neighbor boy pedals a dented tricycle into what seems a mirror at the centre of the grimy sidewalk. What sorcerer props up this illusion? A frame minus its mirror, no reflection, unadorned life itself, the kid leaving behind one reality for another. At his back, Walter Quay Hand Laundry. In his sights, a cohort out on the street. This is 1940, post- Depression and before the ensuing war. Mere boys, too young for the draft, caught between causes. Margo Davis Margo’s poems have appeared in Light: A Journal of Photography & Poetry, Wisconsin Review, Midwest Quarterly, Slipstream, Agave Magazine, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. Forthcoming poems are to appear in Misfit Magazine, Civilized Beasts, Vine Leaves Literary, Burgers and Barrooms Anthology, and Echoes Off a Canyon Wall, an ekphrastic photo / poetry exhibit.
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The Ekphrastic Review
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June 2025
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