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.
Hannah Freedner, of Vergennes, who is combining work on her junior and senior years of high school this year, says she wrote this piece, “Drugged,” to try to explain the fleeting, euphoric feeling when things just seem to be going well and all is right with the world. Hannah performed this piece earlier this month at Sound Check, a joint open-mic presentation by Burlington City Arts and Young Writers Project.
Drugged
By Hannah Freedner
[I] take it like a drug, one that falls
like rain over my open skin,
drink it in like water
until it runs in my blood
knowing nothing but this feeling,
nothing but euphoria of this moment.
It is palpable, yes, but only then
when it soaks into my skin.
I crave it, yearn for it,
can’t keep the grin off my face
when it coalesces with my blood.
They don’t have a name for it, no,
so I call it life,
when my heart doesn’t beat evenly
in my chest but is rather
the paradox of an EKG,
and breathing isn’t something
I understand the way one
might think.
I strip right down to nothing but skin
and vulnerability;
sprawl on my back in the rain,
nose reaching higher
than the crown of my head,
gills moving softly.
I cackle at those who believe
flying cannot be done,
taste the water that runs in rivulets
down my face,
feel it pool in the hollow of my throat.
Every sense I can possibly comprehend
melts into the grass under my skin.
Check out the December issue of The Voice, the Young Writers Project monthly digital magazine. Click here.
