This Leaf

This leaf is quaint but quiet. This leaf surface has travails, tips, lips and stories. Torn like a love affair, bent like a political candidate, this leaf is soft sculpture. This leaf is three browns: light medium and dark. This leaf’s contours drift up and down like stiff waves. This leaf’s belly flares up like a parachute, like a wind sail. This leaf-wrinkle is the upheaval of mountain surfaces, split into ravines, a crevasse, like oceans edging up to land, like puzzle pieces that were once whole once upon a time, like country borders that fit together in contiguous mass. When? Once upon a time.

This leaf surface is a children’s slide down its playground side. 

Autumn shadows, hills with tree cover, orange-rose shard bands across the horizon.  The Art Institute reminds me how good clean beauty and a leaf can be.  I press this dry autumn leaf down under heavyweight books. I reach down to rescue the fallen ones in pretty autumn, unable to rescue them all.  I asked grown- ups when was I born, they told me, ”You were born in the fall.” I pictured a bridge collapse. Like a lil’ girl dragging her doll by one arm I drag this leaf into the time capsule. 

Flash Issue 13