Welcome to day three of Teen Sequins. Today we’re featuring “Moro Reflex” by Katy Hargett.
It is common knowledge that poetry springs deeply from sound, from song. But as Gregory Orr suggests in “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry” the quality of the greatest poetry is an interdependence on music and imagination, story and structure. Kathryn Hargett’s poem “Moro Reflex” swims with these fused temperaments, a story of family in flowing fragments, led by imagination and the music of language both foreign and domestic. “Bronx is shiqip for asphyxiation,” we are told, and the poem’s lines of shiqip (which if we search, we learn is Albanian) requires no translation, as it stands alone in its song, though its translation brings forward another leaf of narrative. “Asnjëherë mos kini frikë,” the speaker tells Vira, Never fear. “…your mouth forgets your father’s knuckles / as they grope for something to cure,” writes Hargett, and the desire for a cure, for consolation, seems the central spring of this poem, though it seems almost wrong to pull for just one theme from a poem whose craft is as unmistakable and luminous as the bodies to which it has dedicated its act of witnessing. – Sophie Klahr
Kathryn Hargett is a junior at the Alabama School of Fine Arts. Her work has been recognized by numerous national and state-level writing competitions, and has been published by Polyphony HS and Canvas. She is also a 2015 poetry mentee with the Adroit Journal. She believes that rock & roll can save her mortal soul.
Honorable mentions: Analiese Bolinder (Boise High School, Boise, Idaho); Amelia Cabrera (Somersworth High School, Somersworth, NH); Ginny Cunningham (Brighton High School, Cottonwood Heights, UT); Danae Devine (Idyllwild Arts Academy, Ballard, CA); Chandler Dangaard (Fusion Academy, Warner Center, CA); Charlotte Foreman (American Heritage School, Plantation, FL); Taylor Loudermill (Olathe South High School, Olathe, KS); Aimee Lowenstern (Sierra Nevada College, Reno, Nevada); Lauren C. Maltas (Rastrick, West Yorkshire, England, UK); Meghan McGinnis (Skyline High School, Salt Lake City, UT); Grace Montgomery (Interlochen Arts Academy, Interlochen, MI); Lydia Myers (Penn-Trafford High School, Harrison City, PA) Bessie Liu, (University High School, Irvine, CA); Annalise Lozier (Interlochen Arts Academy, Interlochen, MI); Stephanie Lu (Lynbrook High School, San Jose, CA); Isaac Monroe (Pittsburgh CAPA 6-12, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania); Luis Neer (Oak Glen High School, New Cumberland, WV); Jessica Romoff (Brentwood High School, Los Angeles, CA); Bashar Yehya (Maroun Abboud Official Secondary School, Souk al Gharb, Mount Lebanon); Jaelynn Walls (Carnegie Vanguard High School, Houston, TX)
Gigantic Sequins 