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Carolyn Zheng
By Carolyn Zheng
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A call is made at three in the morning.

She told me to come pick her up
At 3 in the morning
With my mom’s gray Cadillac 
That stank with faint traces of cigarettes
So I drove and drove down past that last lane
Away from the lives and lights of the city
Into the complete darkness of dreary streets
Where people silently scream
And no one comes running
‘Cause they’re already running from life

When headlamp light shines on her
She’s leaning with one leg bent 
On a broken concrete wall inside chain-link fence
Has a Hollister white jacket on her back
And teared-up jeans with fishnet stockings on her legs
With knee high boots that click clack 
As she takes a step
She walks over to the Cadillac
Yanks the shotgun door open
Then takes a seat inside 
On top of the plastic cups and wrappers
And quickly shuts the door
To block the drone of the outside night

Red handprints litter her bare skin
Dried up blood is stuck under her black nails
She keeps staring out the window
At dull scenery passing by
At the dead sky
At the flashing film inside her mind

Her gaze is somewhere faraway
But her eyes 
Are still the same, determined, cold steel gray
And we stay silent all the way
Back to the comatose, gross buildings we always see
Until she whispers
To something, somewhere out in the world
But it never passes her lips

Process

For one of my monthly meetings with Davia, we tried to write poems inspired by photos. This was one of those poems. For this piece, the photo had a girl walking on the road in the middle of nowhere as yellow lights approached her, which made me immediately think of a car. Her right hand is also held up to her ear as if she were making a call, and this detail inspired the start of my piece.

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Carolyn Zheng

Carolyn Zheng is a freshman from Massachusetts who hopes to one day be an author. She loves band, math, Spanish…

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