Distinctions by Loralee Clark

 

Image | Pixabay

Distinctions

 

Paging through an old dictionary

Mina learns coven meant “to gather,

to witness”, though now it connotes

a group of witches’ gathering.

 

She studies her hands: hangnails, dry cracked skin. She looks in the mirror:

freckles and wild, strawed hair,

cowlicks on the left side.

Is she a witch?  

 

She collects crabapple, maple, oak 

and cherry leaves into her journal.

She gathers yellowed and browned

leaves into piles, dredges them

through the mud, attaches them

back to trees on their trunks.

 

Is she a witch for witnessing

the trees?  For wanting to make them whole again, refusing them letting 

their leaves loose when the sun sinks low on the horizon?

 

Mina may be; she is also 

a dendrophile 

but she won’t learn that word 

for several more years.

© Loralee Clark

Loralee Clark

Loralee Clark resides in Virginia; her website is sites.google.com/view/loraleeclark.  She has a book forthcoming this year, Solemnity Rites, with Prolific Pulse Press LLC and has been published most recently in Periwinkle Pelican, White Stag Journal, Chewers by Masticadores, Nude Bruce Review, Lucky Leaves, Everscribe, The Rockford Review, and Soul Poetry, Prose and Art Magazine.

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