by Dana Blatte
Maybe we’re all ghosts. Not in some metaphysical way—in the way we hold ourselves like we’re about to take flight. Arms caved around ribs, feet glued to bedsheets, tongues slicked to empty ice cream cartons. There’s something haunting about self-hatred, how we map our bones yet can’t remember faces. See, here is the scar where I bled myself on gravel. Here are the furrows where my stomach rounds into the moon. Here are the photographs of people from my childhood, people who only linger at the corners and never say their names. We have no names. Head empty—or body empty; the two are indiscernible. This is metaphysical, to say the least, and I’m sorry. Maybe it’s time to let go, to stop holding on and smoothing bedsheets and mapping skin and just fly, forgive the ground. Liminal space. Girl gone rogue. Nothing but air.
Dana Blatte (she/her) is a junior in high school in Massachusetts. Her work is published in Fractured Lit, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Peach Magazine, and more, and has been recognized by the National YoungArts Foundation and the Pulitzer Center, among others. Find her hyping up her friends on Twitter @infflorescence.
Emerge Literary Journal 