​Teen Sequins 2021: Emma Tian, Age 14 

“fugue“
​
he is a waxen man, hollowed out into a box and a bed for the aging Rottweiler curled up in the
pit of your chest.
the sky is bruised purple - the man is sitting cross-legged, eating birthday cake with a buckknife
in the middle of the street as the sun goes down.
if the dog's fur had not been so matted, it might've danced a little in some hypothetical breeze.
there are shards of emptied bottles flung into the ground at different stages in time - see, the
scraps left of last New Year's are already grains of sand underfoot. (I think we made some
promises, but that was before you stopped picking up the phone.)
here is the glass hammered between the gravel and
the rest of it is newer, probably from earlier today. the pieces are still bright green and perfumed,
wreathed around our pallid man like some bitter shrine.
he sits with eyes closed. I don't need a new song, he says - I just want permission and another
January, another carbon copy. I remember taste, and I remember what it is to miss it.
there is still blood underneath his fingernails from the last time he shared a kitchen table.
now, the streetlights are getting dimmer - that means the dinner has gone cold. we should be
getting home soon, two months later or three weeks
ago.
look at the animal again, lying on the cardboard mattress in the home he has made inside of
you. look at the illusions of motion - blinking, wagging: the maggots picking away at his eyes, the
flies circling around his tail (a maypole).
scattered bottlecaps, insect’s feast, hollow figure & a violet setting sun.
when the man remembers how to stand up, he finds he has grown roots and a
refuge.



“potential” “neglect”, “kintsugi”, “complex”, “hang-up”, “fugue”
kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with
golden lacquer. 
​

Emma Tian likes shaken espressos, rollerskating, Wes Anderson movies,
the band Greta van Fleet,hyphens, her dog, weird socks,
Doc Martens, flannels, Stevie Nicks, long sentences,
& loud cities with a lot of lights.