High School Poet Hits Home with Her ‘Violent Heart’

By John Harlow | Editor-in-Chief

No one is quite sure how it started, and some may debate why.

But a poem written by a high school student that won second place in the recent Friends of the Palisades Library writing contest has, over the last few days, become a viral sensation.

Old-fashioned photocopies of the poem, “Teaching Our Daughters To Take Up Too Much Space,” by Jessica Romoff, have been distributed by hand at Palisades Charter High School since it was announced that Donald Trump is president-elect.

It has been promoted on the “Womankind” website by Maryam Zar, chair of the Pacific Palisades Community Council.

“The poem is quite apropos for the mood of the day and the undeniable rejection of a qualified woman to hold a crucial post,” she said.

Mysteriously, it has has even reached Britain, where Jackie Wills, an award-winning poet and teacher, said it fizzed with the energy of fury “in the tradition of American visionaries like Walt Whitman, Alan Ginsberg and Alice Walker.”

When informed by the Palisadian-Post that her poem had made a mark amongst her peers, Romoff, who studies at Brentwood School and has already been published in Simon & Shuster’s “Get Lit Rising” compilation, simply said “that’s great.”

“It came from the pressures young women face as they grow up,” she told the Post.

“It came from my experience of constantly apologizing. [And] of the strong women I look up to.

“As a woman in America, a part of me is terrified.

“I am terrified to have a president who has been accused of sexual assault.

“I am terrified we have a vice president that wants to enact conversion therapy on people like me.

“I am terrified that my body and reproductive rights will be stolen from me.

“But another part of me knows that I have an unwavering fire in my throat that will not burn out until I know there is justice.

“I know my body is not free territory, is not up for debate, is not a Supreme Court case.

“Eleanor Roosevelt wrote my favorite quote ‘a woman is like a tea bag—you never know how strong it is until it’s in hot water.’ Donald Trump is hot water. Get ready to watch the women of this country swallow it whole.

“I always write about myself. About the trauma I experience, about what I think is beautiful, about what smoldered to only hold under my tongue and in between my lungs.

“I am a violent heart, and that is what I write about. I write about what is important to me as a woman. About what makes my blood boil and my pulse rattle.”

Teaching Our Daughters To Take Up Too Much Space

From the moment we are unwrapped from our mother’s arms
The way the first rose blooms from a field of winter
We are taught the hereditary habit of shrinking
From as early as I can remember
I had bookshelves spilling with stories of princesses
locked up in towers, plagued with a tail instead of legs, accidentally eating poisonous apples.
All waiting for a man’s mouth to make them human again. To kiss the death
out of their poison. To save this poor girl, stitched from tissue and silence
From a young age, I was taught that to be a woman
Was to be rescued by someone else. That my body was not my own,
unless a man made it one.
It is a teaching I do not remember learning
To burn down this childhood house
When you are around someone long enough, you begin to pick up their habits
The way my friend would pinch at her stomach
A woman in a hotel bathroom, criticizing the mirror.
Watching my mother earn 75 cents to a man’s dollar
High school girls are terrified of wearing a skirt to school
Because their teachers would remind them of how their bodies
were unwanted distractions, because they were hindering their male classmates education
And here is the lineage of shrinking women sacrificing an 8th grade girl’s bony knees
for the sake of excusing another teenage boy
It is a habit of making our girls hate themselves
People wonder why girls always say “sorry”
before asking a question
it is because we are taught that our voices take up too much space
that we are an apology
But what I should have been told
was how there is nothing more powerful, more dangerous
than a woman,
working 4 shifts a day, or a mother who runs the household,
who can say I love myself.
Instead of giving our daughters stories
of how to be rescued, how to be saved, how to be forgotten
let’s start reminding our daughters of all the battles we fought, and won
Because we are soldiers in silk
Fighting this war on body and mirror
Learning to plant blossoms in our bruises
To grow gardens in our gashes,
Healing wounds from history’s grenades
remind her she is not an apology
They say a woman is like a tea bag, you never know how strong it is until it’s in hot water
So give her bedtime stories of Joan of arc.
A young girl who led the French army into a battle against the English, and won
give her kisses of Cleopatra, 18 years when she became queen of the Nile
fill her lungs with the song Sacagawea, with a baby on her back
hauling Lewis and Clark across North America
Sing her lullabies of Malala, 15 when she demanded that girls be allowed to receive an education. A man slithered onto her school bus
shot her in the temple 3 times, 3 years later,
with no apologies, she stood in front of the united nations
told them how her country was on fire
We are not here to burn the skin of our sanctuary
We are here to rebuild the ruins of our temple
Long ago destroyed
instead of learning to say “I love you”
we could learn to say “I love my self”
the most ruthless battle cry there ever was.