My Therapist Tells Me to Take a Walk in the Woods

Poetry by Amy Thatcher | From Issue 31, Summer 2026

My Therapist Tells Me to Go for a Walk in the Woods


If something is broken 
in me, it’s my admiration
for forests. They remind
me of the windblown
 
boyfriends I refused 
to bring home––
sludgy, tousled brutes, 
their bark-carved names 

now callused over 
and forgotten, pastless 
as this spectacle of petals
dotting the grass.   
 
I’ve been too long 
without nature, 
its nagging, uncut lawn. 
I’m simple, utilitarian 
 
as cast iron cracked
over the neighbor man’s 
head. Beauty’s none 
of my business.

Amy Thatcher (she/her)

Amy Thatcher’s debut poetry collection, Weird Girl, won the The Journal’s 2025 Charles B Wheeler Prize, to be published by the Ohio State University Press in February 2027.

Poet Note

This poem, like many of my poems, is very place-based in the working class neighborhoods of Philadelphia, where nature is a foreign element. Although the speaker of the poem is situated in a pastoral setting, she harbors a very Philadelphia-esque suspicion of ornamentation, sentimentality, and emotional availability. Her stubborn resistance to the esoteric concept of pastoral healing is a testament to her own hard fought ability to heal, and quite literally, callus over the past.