[Y]oung Writers Project, an independent nonprofit based in Burlington, engages young people to write and use digital media to express themselves with clarity and power, and to gain confidence and skills for school, the workplace and life.
Check out the most recent issue of The Voice, Young Writers Project’s monthly digital magazine. Click here.
Each week, VTDigger features a writing submission – an essay, poem, fiction or nonfiction – accompanied by a photo or illustration from Young Writers Project.
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, share their photos, art, audio and video, and to explore and connect online at youngwritersproject.org. For more information, please contact Susan Reid at sreid@youngwritersproject.org.
Immigration issues are swirling around us these days, and Burlington poet Alexandra Contreras-Montesano urges us to pay attention. With great emotional appeal, she pens the story of a child separated from their mother while emigrating from Central America.
Cages
By Alexandra Contreras-Montesano
[I] want my mother at night –
when my body catches up with my mind
and my face unfolds from sleep,
so I can remember every detail
of the dream that woke me.
I want my mother at night –
when I stumble from my raised bed
to hers, two rooms down and to the left.
Her covers are better, her arms warmer,
her breath reassuring.
I want my mother at night –
when I lose my first tooth
and I don’t know if the fairy will come
because I might have put it
under my pillow too late.
I want my mother at night –
when she keeps the light on in her room
while she reads the bills until the morning.
I want my mother at night –
when the shouting reverberates in my ears
about how what we have
is not enough anymore,
and how the crops are nothing
compared to NAFTA.
I want my mother at night –
when the days are getting longer
and my feet are so tired from walking,
and I don’t even know where I am going…
just that it is better.
I want my mother at night –
when we take the loud bus
to the closest town to the border,
and there is no light to tell us where we are.
I want my mother at night –
when I wake up and my arms
are uncurled from her neck
and I can no longer feel her face
pressed against mine,
and when they tell me to be still
but tell her to move away.
I want my mother at night –
when I reach out, but all I find are bars.
I want my mother at night –
when someone who is only two years older
tries to wipe my tears but I know that
if their cage is as cold as mine
then they are not company but a captive.
I want my mother at night –
when I have finally learned
how to live in the dark
but they thrust me into the light of release,
and the sweet taste of untainted air
is sullied by the lack of those
whose arms I was torn from,
right here, just days before.
I want my mother at night –
when I reach out and still feel bars.
Even if they are taken away,
I know I will never be able to
sleep alone again.
