The Science of Peregrination
Dana Blatte
Sharon, Massachusetts
Sharon High School
Poetry
We open
our hands into birds, set
needle fires just to coax
their truths. Think. Little
dangers: the way we peel
back wings and deposit lumps
of lavender. Here—
we flush our flames into eggs
-hells. Think, little
horrors: our bodies smiling
in a grave. Swallowing
the embers of a prickled lie. We close
our hands and extinguish
every flower—sadistic, sophisticated, lacking any term. We churn
out token truths just to feel
weightless,
weary,
smoking in our eggshells, budding
every fist. Wallowing
skies and sinews and all those skinny limbs. Our bodies, little
dangers in the making; horror
after horror in a labyrinth gone flight-
risk. We are liminal—each reality
has no compass—finding, flying, faultline. This one not
kindling, nor lacking
any truth. Weightless, weary, there is
no sallow rest:
we posit
our graves, plot the feathers, felling
every ash. Portrayal as a truth:
sorrow is still sorrow without open-
ing. Here—think smoky bruises and my hands:
the littlest of dangers.
EDITORIAL PRAISE
In the words of one of the editors who read this piece: “This isn’t language for the sake of language; it is language that happens to be beautiful while discussing imagination in a way I haven’t seen before”. It’s true; the author expertly weaves motifs of fire, flowers, and birds throughout a wavering structure and clever line breaks. “The Science of Peregrination” thus culminates into something simultaneously elegant and disturbing.
Dana Blatte is a high school student from Massachusetts. Her work is published in Fractured Lit, The Shore, Peach Magazine, and more. She is a 2021 student in The Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship, the Iowa Young Writers' Workshop, and Alpha, The Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Workshop for Young Writers. Besides writing, she loves linguistics, bedroom pop, and honey almond butter.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR