A leaf in a back pocket is an odd image for love, but dee's untitled poem, dated July 4th, 2013 and marked only by asterisks, builds everything on it. The speaker wishes to carry the loved one around like a lucky charm. By the end, the wish has become a quiet confession: the tenderness is real, but so is the fear of losing it. The poem's central idea is that love feels like luck, and anything lucky can be lost.
The first stanza opens with a hesitant "I wish," set on a line of its own, and then sprawls into a long, winding sentence that mimics the search it describes. Someone rustles through dead leaves, deep in the woods, hunting for one that is "just barely clinging to life" yet is "the perfect shade of green." The detail matters. Green is the colour of life, and the speaker finds it in a place full of decay, so the beloved is imagined as something vivid and fragile at once. The word "venation" stands out in an otherwise casual voice. It is precise, almost scientific, and it suggests a person who looks closely at someone they love. There is also a small twist in the pronouns. In this stanza "you" is the finder, the one who feels lucky "to have someone who loves you," and only in the second stanza does "you" turn into the leaf itself. The lucky person and the luck have been blended together.
That second stanza moves from simile to metaphor. Stanza one said the beloved was "like some little good luck charm"; now the speaker says flatly, "You are that leaf." The wish has also quietly turned into a fact, since the leaf is "tucked neatly away" in "my favorite blue jeans." The ordinary detail grounds the romance, and it makes the threat feel ordinary too: all it would take is a ripped stitch. The speaker imagines losing the leaf "to the chaos of the world" and then reaches for the poem's harshest phrase, "carcasses of dead wishes." The brown leaves on the forest floor become the wishes of other people that never came true. Against them, the green leaf looks both precious and precarious. The stanza closes by repeating the woods and the emptiness, "Deep in the woods, / Where no one is around," and the rhyme of "ground" with "around" gives this lonely image a final click.
The last stanza drops the imagery of the forest and speaks more directly. "I couldn't replace you if I tried" is simple and absolute, and "my leaf, / My lucky green leaf" becomes almost a chant. The key phrase is "absentminded touch." The speaker keeps patting the pocket without thinking, and the reason, given in the final lines, changes the poem's mood: "Just to remind myself / that you're still there- / that you're still mine." What looked like pure devotion is also anxiety. The dash and the repeated "that you're still" feel like a thought catching itself mid-breath, and the possessive "mine" lands with both pride and need.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no regular rhythm or rhyme scheme. Line lengths swing from the tiny "I wish," to the long, tumbling line about the carcasses of dead wishes. The adverbs "Inexplicably / Relentlessly" each get their own line, which slows the poem down and lets their matching -ly endings chime. Capitalisation and punctuation are loose (a stray space before a comma, a dash that stops short), which makes the poem sound spoken rather than polished. The repeated woods, leaf and pocket give the unruly lines something to hold on to.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it gets out of one small, specific object. Love poems often reach for grand comparisons, but here the comparison is something that could fit in a pocket and crumple in a wash. That smallness makes the feeling believable. It also shows how an extended metaphor can do two jobs at once: the leaf is the beloved, and it is also the speaker's habit of checking, over and over, that love is still there.