Snow White and Sleeping Beauty Address Their Creator (Spoken Word Piece)

2011 Worcester Youth Poetry Slam Team performing at the annual Brave New Voices International Poetry Festival. Anna Meehan and Taylor Liljegren wrote and performed the piece, "Snow White and Sleeping Beauty Address Their Creator." This was a BNV Semi-Finals Bout, which took place at the Oakland Museum of CA, July 23rd, 2011. Filmed by Slam Coach Alex Charalambides.

*Rough transcript by Alexis Manyrath 

Snow White
Sleeping Beauty
Both

Mr. Disney!
Before your pen found me I was just an uncracked wish bone, 
a body in the woods dragged up by a man who didn't mean to wake me.
Before your edit, I was just an abandoned cadaver of a princess,
with a becoming silence that screamed consent. 
See, in your haste to create a message for young girls to be
patient and pretty, you left out the whole story. 
It's a grim tale about how my skin under the glass of my casket had thawed to a grey spring;
how it took more than true love's kiss to wake this sleeping beauty;
how a man can love a corpse of a girl –
and this isn't about the apple lodged in my lungs,
the splinter pulsing in my fingertip.
We just wanted to ask,
do we really look most beautiful with our mouths shut? 
Dressed up like dolls, on display for any man to see – and do! – as he pleases.
In the forest, in castles, in death beds; but deathbeds have flowers,
and flowers are beautiful,
and we all want beautiful things.
He just wanted a beautiful thing 
with skin as white as snow
and a briar rose face.
It's amazing what your artists have done for my complexion. 
I look as stunning as I did before the spinning wheel.
The apple incident.
Funny how the little things come back to bite you and isn't it strange,
how our titles give away exactly what we look like but you struggle to remember our names? 
I highly doubt my prince gave some formal introduction.
I highly doubt he checked for a pulse –
but I mean he fought a dragon!
And she was just lying there, asking for it. 
And that's as good as a yes, As good as a marriage, 
As good as waking up with his children crawling in your bed
We are the ones who slept through our sexual awakenings.
Every morning, is a wound scraped open.
He scraped me open, Walt.
No one hates the sunrise like I do. 
Every morning is a flip-book sketch of how I laid in his arms, 
dumb as a coffin as he carried me over the threshold.
(???) – as the lucky woodsman found himself a girl who just can't say no 
and I'd like to ask him, 
was there ever a moment of hesitation? 
Was the white of my skin just a hint of the bones that lay beneath it? 
It's a strange thing, mister Disney, 
how the details get lost in translation, 
how easy it is to forget the little things,
how we can turn perverts into princes,
and princesses into pornography,
how in all your changes you still manage to make little girls want nothing else
than our happily ever after.