Earlier summer she found a small tree at the edge of the wood
across the meadow, its leathery leaves big as her palms:
crab apple.
Today she takes her notebook, three crayons peeled of their paper,
curls a maelstrom in the winds and makes her way
to pinch a leaf off its twig with her fingernails, lay it flat,
rub its outline on three different pages.
When she gets home she opens library books with illustrations
copying on one etching she writes clearly, linearly:
apex, margin, vein, midrib, base, petiole
sharp as a blade.
The next etching is messier—pencil line covered with blue pen through wax,
gone over again with brown marker: leaf hair, xylem, stomata, mesophyll.
She wonders why her teachers aren’t this thorough like the library books.
As she writes, she recites in her mind “anything worth learning is worth learning well”
pitching her voice as chastising or innocent depending on the teacher’s mood.
Mina can’t define context, but she can read a room.
She knows dicots and the rose family, pomes and florals in fours and fives.
Now she knows stomata is a short word for mouth and lungs, so she will breathe
onto the leaves’ stomata and watch its fruits, green and hard as walnuts, grow.
Just before the snow comes she’ll pull each apple the deer have left from its twig
bury a few in the meadow and bring the rest into the kitchen.
She’ll slice them in half, her full weight on the knife, picking whole seeds out,
tracing the pentagram with her pointer finger.
She’ll draw the apple and its hidden pentagram in her notebook,
the seeds dried and saved in a glassine envelope, taped to the inside cover.
At the end of the school year the apple pages, all the leaf diagrams,
the glassine envelope with dried seeds–she tears them out
and pastes everything into a new notebook for the summer.
Soon she’ll have accumulated more notebooks than years she’s lived.
She’ll bring them to the bathroom and weigh them on the scale
then weigh herself. She’ll wonder which number
is more substantial.
—
Loralee Clark is a writer who grew up learning a love for nature and her place in it, in Maine. She resides in Virginia now as a writer and artist. Her Instagram is @make13experiment; her website is sites.google.com/view/loraleeclark. She has a book forthcoming, Solemnity Rites, with Prolific Pulse Press LLC and has been published most recently in Unearthed, One Art, Choeofpleirn Press, Wingless Dreamer, Heart on Our Sleeves, The Taborian, Superpresent, and Thimble Literary Magazine.
