How have girls and women risen up against oppression throughout history?

Her glass slippers were bound to shatter by midnight,
if she danced at all in the way shoes were meant to be danced in.
       When a crack from a waltz spiderwebbed into a million shards of choices,
she had no choice but to embrace crimson soles.

She sprinted on shattered glass that scratched and scraped her,
        Nipped at her toenails, shaving them straight,
Stabbed the longest shard up her heel.

She begged for new shoes,
         But they choked her feet with slippers better fitting a baby,
Bent them, bound them into crumpled lotuses.

Crippled as a crone,
She became a pile of pink petals shriveling,
         In a desert refracting all the light she could not find.

She preferred the pain of movement,
         Peeled the shoes off of her shrunken feet,
Figured out how to stand again.

She trained herself to jump on the tip of her toes,
With the grace of a doe bounding away from its hunter.
         She couldn’t let the wound he had inflicted slow her down.

Sometimes she only hopped on one foot,
          so that the other had a chance of healing,
Pirouetting for a production no one would ever see.

She danced on the glass for so long,
Calluses hardened into a shield.
         Toes and glass chiseled away at each other, 
Eroding small crystal pebbles into dust.

Ribbons of pink skin hung off of her ankles,
        Yet she balanced en pointe in triumph, 
Twirling to the slowing tempo.

She held her breath, 
        wondering if there would be a standing ovation.

Process

I began writing this poem at a workshop, but never quite finished it. I revised this poem after coming back to it after some time since I saw new ways in which I could develop the poem’s meaning.