cording the cotton and wool fibers layer after layer encircling one another;
an offering for all the white petals she plucks and tapes
onto cool, blue painted pages: perfect corollas.

Before she leaves the maple, she polishes the roots
where they rise from the ground
with sweaty, greasy fingers and grass blades, jutted
with moss and violets: beacons of safety.

Over time the leaves she glued into her 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 from her teacher
Mina spends one weekend studying the fine hairs on some leaves,
sculpts accurate petioles and ribs from clay and paints them in greens and browns.
She draws all the shapes she sees in the leaves,
cutting them with tiny scissors to release the chlorophyll, smearing
white pages green, painting her fingers and knuckles with thousands of chloroplasts
like so many tadpoles in a pond.

Like a thunderstorm, Mina is a cloud
interacting with air pressure, fungal spores
smoke, ash, temperature.
Mina doesn’t recognize yet
she isn’t creating a remedy;
she is the remedy.