Rooftop Poetry Club - Amanda Grace Fromm

Amanda Grace Fromm

Bio:
This fall, Amanda Grace Fromm will be entering her sophomore year as a full-time student at Buffalo State College. Her interests include reading and writing poetry, playing guitar, singing, and artistically expressing herself in other ways. Involvement in the Rooftop Poetry Club has been one of Amanda's first opportunities to share her poetry and learn more about the world of literature.

Poems:

V

How can we face a statistic like one in four?
How can we thrive in a society content to leave us
with our cunts bleeding, maintaining fetal position, heavy, on the floor?

How does any country with any conscience
let such a crime against all of humanity go with such little consequence?

How can our little girls not shed a tear
when sexual violence and exercises of hatred are such vivid parts of simply growing up
So likely to happen, immobilizing,
confirming every single old and instilling new fears

How are we to smile?
How are we to live?

We hold ourselves
It is us alone
because the system
just doesn't give a shit

Like a body is an instrument of control
Like it is a simple thing to put laws on
and when it carries the female symbol
it is inconsequential to take rights from

But my anatomy displays no eagle emblem
I was never born branded as property of any federal government
and my body was never protected by the command “Do Not Destroy”
So I am not something which can be owned, and I do not owe anything

And aint that the American way?
Or, at least what it was meant to be, whether or not it was ever really seen?
As school children, aren't we lied to?
Rallying the troops of seven year-olds for war, aren't we taught this?
We all have our lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness,
Screaming until our voices growl so roughly, that they could bleed
That we are the one and only, divine - We are the land of the free

Yes, tell me this, gentlemen:
What is life without freedom?
And how might we define freedom,
if not in the terms of the rights which we were once sure that we were born with?

How is it that you suppose we will keep silent?
We are now every goddess strong
and every time that we have been done wrong
it has left a scar
and we remember the story of each one
and justice will be done.