Embedded Files
It's Here!
It's Here!
Are you ready to read a poetry book that explores how a child grows up and unconsciously looks to trees and her ecosystem to parent and nurture her?
Alchemy
She twists two strips of cloth
around the crabapple’s trunk,
cording the cotton fibers
layer after layer;
an offering for the white petals
she plucks and tapes
onto cool, blue painted pages:
perfect corollas.
When she leaves the maple
she polishes the roots
with sweaty, greasy fingers,
surrounded by grass blades
jutted with moss and violets.
The leaves she glued in the notebook
dry and crack, pieces flake off.
Mina stores them in an envelope with a plastic window,
learns to tape the leaves onto the pages.
When she writes over them, she feels
the pen’s nib breaking through each cell wall,
her body registering the thin depressions
as a new shape is pushed into both their bodies.
Borrowing a magnifying glass
Mina spends one weekend studying
the fine hairs on some leaves,
sculpts petioles and ribs from clay,
paints them in greens and browns.
She draws all the shapes she sees in the leaves,
cutting them with tiny scissors
releasing the chlorophyll, smearing
white pages green, painting her fingers and knuckles
with thousands of chloroplasts
like so many tadpoles in a pond.
Like thunderstorms, Mina is a cloud
mingling with air pressure, fungal spores
smoke, ash, temperature.
Mina doesn’t recognize yet
she isn’t creating a remedy;
she is the remedy.
(First published in The Taborian, 2024)
Through Mina's eyes, this collection traces the quiet resilience of a girl growing up under the weight of toxic parentage. Each poem feels like a sketch--tender, searching and alive with the small details that make survival beautiful. It's an intimate and emotionally honest exploration of what it means to keep growing, even in difficult soil.
--Aluana Lester, Editor-in-Chief, Still Here Magazine
In Loralee Clark’s third chapbook, A Harmony in the Key of Trees: A Healing Myth, she deftly explores her most challenging material yet: childhood scars, survival, and the road to wholeness. Clark excels at world building in this collection about Mina, a lonely girl who escapes the emotional neglect and upheaval of her home life through writing, drawing and wandering the woods to transcend her estrangement from her family: “She thinks she will be forgotten like eyelash wishes, snarls embedded in a brush, water long after it has been swallowed.” Clark artfully switches from first to third person to offer us Mina’s intimate and moving revelations: “I took some beeswax and thread and I sit under the maples and oaks; I make strand after strand of soft, colorful leaves to bring into my room. They are my comfort.” Clark’s language is lyrical, tender, and anchored in a deep knowlege love of the natural world: “She will breathe onto the leaves’ stomata and watch its fruits, green and hard as walnuts, grow.” Clark invites us to accompany her on a mythical voyage through the forest where we too can examine our open wounds, the scars we carry and the yearnings we neglected or buried long ago. Through Mina’s imagination, her deep attention to the world around her, her commitment to her art, and her determination not be defined by her pain, we can imagine forging a new path, creating beauty from our suffering–even triumphing.
--Ann Chinnis, Pushcart Prize recipient, 2025, author of Poppet, My Poppet and I Can Catch Anything
A Harmony in the Key of Trees: A Healing Myth by Loralee Clark is a stunning piece of work that captures an introspective view of one character, a young girl named Mina, through her engagement with her parents and with nature. Mina reveals visceral moments of her painful childhood, most often in a smattering of poems throughout this collection, all simply titled “Rules,” which are then juxtaposed by her deep connection to the natural world around her, demonstrated in poems such as “All the Leaves,” “Distinction,” “Dendromancy” and more. Clark has a unique, beautiful gift of story-telling, one that invites the reader inside the poems to share the pain of a parent’s rejection as well as the delicate beauty of a “silk and egg nest” on the underside of an oak leaf in “Dichotomy.” This life-laid-bare technique provides a precious, indelible glimpse of what it means to hurt and what it means to heal.
--Arvilla Fee, Founder & Editor Soul Poetry, Prose & Arts Magazine
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse