Young 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 email Susan Reid at sreid@youngwritersproject.org.
If you’ve never been on the receiving end of a man’s unwanted gaze, it can be difficult to fully understand the level of vulnerability women can feel in the street, in the workplace… and in schools. This week’s featured poet, Aurora Sharp of Moretown, examines the varied forms of misogyny young female students face in the learning environments that should be ensuring their fair treatment and protection.
They Lied About Sleeping Beauty
Aurora Sharp, 17, Moretown
She’s 2 years old in spaghetti straps,
still
a fairy princess
who hasn’t learned
what they did to Sleeping Beauty.
Smiles sticky with strawberry,
muddy drip-castles,
crayons and paper crowns.
Sing the alphabet while you wash your hands—
No.
Go home, girl, the boys can see your shoulders.
She’s 2 years old,
but that’s 2 going on 12,
going on
first-day-of-middle-school and that skirt’s a knuckle higher than regulation.
Going on
16, and grown men won’t take their eyes off you,
18, afraid at the college campus,
afraid
to be the one-in-five,
one-in-four,
13, 19, 27%.
2 years old, going on
Tumblr posts with SOS hotlines,
first-time-being-followed-back-from-the-subway,
swallowed by the wolf.
Hold your keys in your fist, don’t leave your drink.
Remember, long hair is easier to grab onto.
Red Riding Hood, swallowed by the wolf.
The superhero
in skin-tight vinyl
wears knives like diamonds,
crushes kingdoms with cutting words,
but it’s her curves that make her watchable,
the same watchable that labels naked knees a reason to close textbooks.
That turns hemlines
into meals for hungering eyes.
As if the hemline mattered.
As if
an inch of collarbone
tastes more like forbidden fruit than excuses.
Nothing she could have done
would have changed the way those eyes follow her.
The slavering lips
wrench bile from my guts.
It splatters onto white tile, hot against cold.
I know
what happened to Sleeping Beauty,
but it’s the storyteller, not prince,
that makes me sick.
