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.