Welcome to day one of Teen Sequins 2016! Today’s poem is “Home” by Carrie Zhang.
Carrie Zhang’s “Home” is a delicate survey of expanses, stretching both across human history and the width of a wrist. Zhang’s poem refuses stillness or the employment of only one perspective, spinning from the first spark of human love to celestial objects, from a “burial of cartilage” to the first melody in existence. But these records and expressions of expansion are put forth in the service of what Zhang determines is the core of human activity and origin: Home. The poem ends with a cry to home, perhaps up-cast in gratitude or in helplessness. Perhaps in both. -Sophie Klahr
HOME
Across the oceans, beyond the mountains the fire
barely burns in the night like a thousand missed holidays
and a thousand untold ancestors who made it possible to be alive
the place where human love first sparked, unrecognizable
The flat plain of your wrist, in the burial of cartilage and gelatin
the lily where man and women laid together, the antheridium
and the castle around them, in a quiet mythologism
of belonging. The remnant of the sun that rises like the moon
in a holocaust of beauty, the smile of children in the forest conjured
like the first melody that entered our existence, past the
cold deserts & dry oceans, the strange meridian of emotions where flies the viceroy,
the home alone hears your cry; this place made me, this place made me.
Carrie Zhang is an artist with a newfound interest in fashion design. Her favorite recording artist is Janet Jackson and she has recently been highly influenced by Andy Warhol. She still likes to write poetry, and is interested in innovating its form. Her favorite color is lime green. She lives in Green Brook, a small town in NJ, and she goes to Watchung Hills, a big high school in NJ.
Honorable mentions: Eden Donelli (City Honors School, Buffalo, NY), Katie Han (Falmouth High School, Falmouth, ME), Sreesha Ghosh (GEMS Modern Academy, Dubai, UAE), Srishti Ghosh (GEMS Modern Academy, Dubai, UAE), Kate Martellock (Cazenovia High School, Cazenovia, NY), Caroline Sasso (Greenhill School, Dallas, TX), Lauren Stone (Southington High School, Southington, CT), Jocelynn Williams (Oakland Catholic High School, Pittsburgh, PA)
Gigantic Sequins 