Hunter A.'s poem is about surviving destruction. A fire has swept through a forest, and the speaker addresses one leaf, a "little leaf" that has been burnt. The image of a vengeful creature lighting it "like a cigarette in a green ashtray" is oddly casual and cruel: the harm feels careless, as if the leaf were nothing more than something to be used up and left behind.
In the second half, the focus widens to the ruined forest and the "broken ground" the leaf now walks on. That small shift, from a leaf to someone who walks, suggests the leaf stands in for a person. Judging by the imagery, the speaker is describing someone hurt, perhaps by another person, who is left to continue in the aftermath. New leaves "peek through the ash," a quiet sign of hope, but the heart is "glued with sap like broken glass," and the bones are "like porcelain." The mood is tender and fragile: grief and anger sit beside a cautious, shaky sense of recovery.