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Martyr, In Spring

I am a ghost before I am

a girl. In my backyard, the gunshots

sound like flowers. I rip my feet

from the dirt. The wet brown

the smudge of a deer’s eyes.

There is a hole in the ground

where the fox lives. Where I bury

pebbles like lost treasure. One day

they will make their way back to me. I will cry

or maybe I will laugh a storm between my teeth.

For now, I sit cross-legged on the porch and watch the birds

red, blue, white, bobbing

through the trees like little flags. I could be them

if I knew how to fly. I am so passive

when it suits me, but

I need to be the fox

the deer

the dirt

the girl clawing out from underneath the shed.

Look into my eyes. Tell me you have a gun

and that it is not alive. One day

I will make a fist full of petals. They will linger

before they fall and I will count them until I am someone real.

Gospel

After “Classical Landscape with Figures” by Maurice Denis


The sun turned the trees pinker than the underside of a girl’s tongue. Light spotted the horizon as if we were looking at it through cataracts. Shift, and the blotches ran together. Amber on green on rust-red bark and girls stooped like angels in the inverted shadows. Look how the unnatural can be made pretty, the innocent revered as stones on pedestals. They were statues. All of it was: the landscape and its creator. Look again and it was never about holiness. It was about the land in the girl’s mouth and the scream that rose around it.

Dana Blatte is a high school student from Massachusetts. Her work is published in Fractured Lit, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Rust+Moth, The Shore, and more. Besides writing, she loves digital illustration, bedroom pop, and honey almond butter. Find her on Twitter @infflorescence.

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