Young Writers Project is a creative online community of teen writers, photographers and artists, which has been based in Vermont since 2006. Each week, VTDigger features the writing and art of young Vermonters who publish their work on youngwritersproject.org, a free, interactive website for 12- to 18-year-olds. To find out more, visit youngwritersproject.org, or contact Executive Director Susan Reid at sreid@youngwritersproject.org and 802-324-9538.
If you’ve ever been listening to the radio absentmindedly as you went about your day and felt yourself suddenly seized by the key change of a song, felt a shiver run through your body as pin-prickling as a first kiss, you’ll understand the experience of this week’s featured poet late one night. When Essex-based Scarlett Cannizzaro heard just the right note hit at just the right time, she followed her physical instinct: Nothing to do but get up and dance.
Key change
By Scarlett Cannizzaro, 15, of Essex
Some things in the world
just click,
they just fit together
as one half of a pie
would with the other.
They get tossed
and turned
and thrown around the world,
until they find their place.
Sitting on my small,
dainty bed,
I listen to song after song,
piece after piece,
on my bottomless playlist,
and when I hear this one,
something about it turns a switch inside me.
Just when that perfect moment hits,
that flawless key change,
its tunes grow arms,
grow vines,
that break the brick wall of my skin
and reach,
spiraling,
deep down into the maze of my chest
searching for the lock,
because that one key change
holds the key.
And when it finds it,
my heart explodes.
It erupts,
sending shockwaves of
electricity
and power
and something so unbelievably real
throughout me,
throughout the air surrounding me.
How something so small
in such a small space
could produce
so
much
energy,
I do not know.
I stand up and dance,
waving my arms and legs
in any way they want to go.
My parents call from downstairs,
asking me what I could possibly be doing
at midnight
in my tiny room
that could cause such a racket.
I am as curious as them.
And then I fall back onto my bed,
staring at the popcorn ceiling,
letting that key change
that changed everything
soak up every last bit of me.