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.
Mingo Maquera is a 17-year-old senior at Bellows Free Academy in St. Albans. In this poem, which he turned into a song, he compares a failed relationship to a cigarette. “It lasted about as long,” he says. And while Mingo says that he never has smoked and never will, he has a “morbid curiosity about it all,” and that curiosity is conveyed in this piece.
Cigarette
By Mingo Maquera
[I] still smell your smoke
on my body and I begin to choke
back my tears but I fail,
remembering the Hard’ack trail
when we began to coexist.
It had been a while since I was kissed
but you weren’t sure.
I did not know
in every kiss and staring eye
you hid a secret last goodbye.
I should have cherished every time
your lips were holding on to mine
and you were perfect. I should know
eventually you’d have to go.
But you went like applause,
a familiar walk to your garage,
where I am trying not to cough
to show that I am man enough
to share the cancer in your lungs.
I never got to be this young.
I am hurt.
I’m human.
