Paper Wings

No knife’s edge is sharper than

being Seventeen: A threshold

in the gray of November.

Last night my friends

came over for Halloween,

and in between projector screenings

of The Office and

passing out candy to kids who are

not yet berated for their differences,

the reenactment of our childhoods

was cut short by the collective

whisper of “politics.”

And we are scared in the way

only the hunted can be.

Scared because we know how

we would bubble in the ballot,

perfectly and without any

erase marks,

learned from years of standardized

tests, yet our pencils don’t find

contact.

And we have voices, too.

I cannot vote for my sister,

my mother, myself,

(God forbid our lives are in danger.)

for my LGBTQ+ friends

who made no “choice” in their loving,

(“Love your neighbor as yourself”)

for the students not unlike me

who died from the bullets

of an AR-15.

(But we’re pro-life, right?)

And we matter.

We remember November 9, 2016

all too well.

The school hallways lingered with

an unspoken sadness, and a

great fear crept into many a

child’s chest.

Even then, we knew what it meant.

And we don’t want to go back

to those “great” times.

Please, I don’t want to wake up

next week

to the same defeat in my

parents’ voices by my bedside,

to the morning news on TV

promising to uproot our

childhoods,

rights,

lives.

Please America, vote for us.

For all the seventeen year olds

in November who know more than

you assume,

whose knowledge isn’t dependent

on their parents’,

who have read the headlines and

heard the hatred that threatens to

split apart Thanksgiving

dinner tables,

but who are not quite old enough

to have any real say.

We promise you one thing: We won’t

accept this version of America.

-A.J