Shannon Frost Greenstein


Part One


In America, we quantize our bodies
and the complexities of our brains –
assigning each part a separate dollar value –
because health insurance companies don’t deal in health;
because health insurance companies deal in profit.

In America, we employ thousands
in the manufacture of bulletproof backpacks;
entire factories pumping out Kevlar
like this band-aid is the same thing as a cure.

In America, the Cold War is over,
but our school children are still trained
to duck and cover and fear and pray,
as if any safety drills are not entirely futile
when the right to bear arms is more sacred
than the right to pursue a future.

In America, we put our architects to work
sketching hostile architecture with each brutal new design.
We exploit the creative left-brain of our brightest citizens
in order to manifest the criminalization of homelessness;
in order to make poverty and mental illness a crime.

In America, we sacrifice our bodies and minds
at the sacred altar of revenue
because Capitalism was born on the plantation;
because Matthew Desmond ultimately said it best.

In America, we are scourged by our addiction
to artificial dopamine
and the escape of self-medication,
because the rich just want to be richer;
because oxycodone turns quite the profit.

In America, we are subject to the whims
of Buffet and Bezos and Zuckerberg the Wise;
our corporations stockpile the most finite of resources
like Smaug hoarding the gold of Middle Earth.

In America, we are chasing the nostalgia
of post-WWII opportunities and growth,
because we still have the pressure of our reputation
as the greatest country in the world.



Part Two


In America, our bootstraps are so worn and cracked
that they are no longer subject
to the laws of gravitation;
they no longer support our weight.

In America, we are all battling demons
that haunt us intergenerationally
because our country is vivisected by inequity
and hurt people hurt people.

In America, we are exhausted by minimum wage
and dead-end jobs
and – if we are in the service industry –
we are exhausted from dealing with all your shit.

In America, we are watching the planet melt
in real time and with terrifying detail
because Mother Earth is also exhausted
from dealing with all our shit.

In America, we are pleading for infrastructure –
instead of the most powerful standing military on Earth –
because our military hasn’t really been standing;
our military has been fighting incessantly since September 11, 2001.

In America, we go without insulin
and discover our cancers way too late;
we decline out-of-network ambulance rides
because we need that money for bills.

In America, we simply wish our votes mattered
as we bear witness to the stalemate of bipartisanship;
we learn to tolerate the distress of our impotence
amidst the fallout of our democracy.

In America, we are tired of crowd-funding.
In America, we are tired of assault rifles.
In America, we are tired of this Sisyphean fight.
In America, we are just tired.

In America…we all just want The American Dream.

Shannon Frost Greenstein (She/They) resides near Philadelphia with her family and cats. She is the author of Through the Lens of Time (2026), a forthcoming fiction collection with Thirty West Publishing, and These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things (2022), a book of poetry from Really Serious Lit. Shannon is a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy and a multi-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Pithead Chapel, Bending Genres, SoFloPoJo, and elsewhere. Shannon’s passions include Friedrich Nietzsche, anti-racism, the Seven Summits, the Hamilton soundtrack, motherhood, and acquiring more cats. Find her at shannonfrostgreenstein.com or on Twitter and Bluesky at @shannonfrostgre. Insta: @zarathustra_speaks

This poem appeared in Record of Dissent: Poems of Protest in an Authoritarian Age — Summer 2025, published by The Chaos Section Poetry Project. We’ll be featuring each poem from the collection individually in the weeks ahead. You can read the full collection or download a free PDF of the chapbook here.