by Amy Anam Cara

All the boys are scared of her.

She breaks into their lockers. Steals all the porn. Replaces it with pleas from trafficked girls who just want to go home.

She spits slimy fingers down their backs in the lunch queue. Just so they know how it feels to flinch from an unwanted touch.

She barges them into maths class. Spills books and blood. Mixes in statistics of violence against women. Teaches them to estimate what a body feels like in fractions.

The school holds a meeting about her. They talk a lot in the way adults do. Unsure if she should be praised or punished.

Amy Anam Cara is a poet and spoken word artist. Her poetry video “A Prickly Subject” was commissioned by The Barbican for their Art of Change series. She was selected by Apples and Snakes for their Future Voices project and was commissioned to make “Beauty/Enmity” – a video poem about our relationship to place. She regularly performs at poetry nights in London and Brighton.