About the Young Writers Project
YWP, an independent nonprofit based in Burlington, Vermont, engages young people to write and use digital media to express themselves with clarity and power and to gain confidence and skills for the workplace and life. YWP publishes about 1,000 students’ work each year here, in newspapers across Vermont, on Vermont Public Radio and in YWP’s monthly digital magazine, The Voice. Since 2006, it has offered young people a place to write, explore and connect online at youngwritersproject.org, which has only one rule: Be respectful. For more information, please contact YWP executive director Geoffrey Gevalt at ggevalt@youngwritersproject.org.
This poem by Alexandra Contreras-Montesano, a freshman at Burlington High School, is among 92 pieces of writing and art featured in Young Writers Project’s anthology to be released Nov. 7 at YWP’s Celebration of Writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier. For more information or to sign up to attend workshops on writing, visual arts and sound at the Celebration, go to youngwritersproject.org.
Afflicted/Breaking/Broken
By Alexandra Contreras-Montesano
[S]he’s not breaking.
They used to whisper about her,
about how there were little cracks around
her face and arms.
She didn’t mind that much;
she just turned her head so that
her face was half hidden.
They couldn’t look her in the eye.
They avoided her, too, as if her breaking might
start to crack their own bodies.
When the cracks crawled up her legs
and up her chest,
they started to forget to whisper.
They looked at her skin and they talked
about the way that it was … different.
When the cracks grew longer,
people started to look at her as the girl
with the breaking body.
They didn’t bother to learn her name.
What was the point if she was crumbling?
When the cracks opened,
people did something worse than whispering
or avoiding her.
They ignored her; they placed her in the background,
classified her as a thing, too fragile to be a person.
When she broke,
her pieces hurtled into people,
catching them with the
suddenness of her brokenness.
The people who had been waiting for
her to break
were the most surprised by the power of
herself.
When she was gone,
people pretended to care,
as if it were not they who had
whispered or talked.
When she was gone,
she was finally there.
She’s not broken.
She’s not broken.
