Welcome to day six of Teen Sequins. Today we’re featuring “Conversation” by Savannah Hampton.
Shifting from a spoken word, to instinctual sound, to personal sensation, “Conversation” becomes a kind of spiritual convergence–what happens between a question spoken and private desire. Touching a horse becomes a prayer. Savannah Hampton’s “Conversation” is an act of following the mind as it experiences the world, a delicate movement from what is said to what is felt to what is hungered for. — Sophie Klahr
“I’d like//to become the fruit/inside her,” Hampton writes, in place of answering the question posed in the poem’s beginning. The poem serves as its own answer; the hair of the horse feels pure and protective as, potentially, a womb. While both speaker and reader become aware that, despite our desire, we inevitably exist in the “humid air” that concludes the poem, there is a longing which Hampton expresses in clear and succinct language and a slight humor. — Robby Auld
Conversation
The man asks me if the
hair feels like a peach or
the skin of a smooth
avocado. I laugh and
run my hand across the
back of the horse. I’d like
to become the fruit
inside her, I think. Preserve me.
Carry me, gracefully
hidden through the
humid air.
Savannah Hampton will shortly be a second year writing student at Pratt Institute. She is intrigued by both short fiction and poetry and likes to imagine blending the two. She matured in Reno, Nevada, where she was surrounded by mountains. Now she is surrounded by buildings, but she finds a certain charm in both.
Honorable mentions: Michael Betancourt (Brookdale Community College, Matawan, New Jersey); Carey Blankenship (Berry College, Mount Berry, GA); Erica Cheung (Rice University, Houston, TX; Khadjiah Johnson (Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, NY); Jess(i)e Marino (Kenyon College, Gambier, OH); Julia Powers (Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY); Caroline Shea (University of Vermont, Burlington, VT); Amanda Silberling (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA); Zoe Stoller (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA); Michael Zendejas (Lonestar Montgomery, Houston, TX)
Gigantic Sequins 