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Nineteenth is a Doorway
By Naomi Setliffe
They wore their no like a winter coat–
Buttoned high against ridicule,
Stitched with street dust and scripture and spit,
White skirts bright as defiance
Beneath a sky that refused to move.
They marched through laughter sharpened into
knives,
Through doors slammed by lawmakers
Their fury unfeminine,
Their courage a phase.
But they learned the language of Iron–
Chains on gates,
Boots on pavement,
Signs held steady
When the world tried to shake their wrists loose.
Some stood like storms brewing in front of power,
Some sang with mouths full of bruised breath,
Some wrote their names into history
With ink and jailhouse shadows–
A chorus of women turning pain into proof.
And then–
The hinge of it:
The 19th Amendment,
A hard-won sentence
That cracked the century open
And let light spill through the seam.
Your voice belongs.
Not borrowed.
Not begged for.
Not granted as a favor.
Belongs.
So when you walk into the booth,
Do not go in alone.
Bring the ones who couldn’t–
The suffragettes, with blistered feet and unbroken eyes.
Bring every girl who watched from windows
And learned to stand by watching someone else refuse to sit down.
Bring your ancestors like lanterns in your pockets,
Their hands guiding yours
To the pen.
To the ballot,
To the sacred act
of being counted.
And then–look forward.
Vote for the ones behind you.
Who are told their English is wrong
for this country.
Vote for the ones whose names are
mispronounced
Until they shrink.
Vote for the ones who work, pay, and bleed
And are still invisible.
Vote for the bodies legislated
by strangers.
Vote for the ones whose schools forget them,
whose neighborhoods are afterthoughts,
whose futures are priced out of reach.
Vote for the ones who can’t speak safely.
The ones silenced
By fear,
By paperwork
By poverty,
By the way a system can hush a person without ever touching their mouth.
Because the vote is not just choice–
It is a vow.
A vow to remember
That rights are never settled,
Only guarded.
A vow to keep the doorway open
For those who follow–
So they don’t have to bleed for a sentenceWe were too tired to use.
So use it.
Use your voice the way they did,
Like a match in a drafty room.
Like a bell that refuses to stop ringing.
Like a promise spoken out loud–
Not just for you.
For those who came before.
For those who will come after.
For those who still do not have a voice in this country–
Until we lend them ours.
Meet the Poet – Naomi Setliffe
Naomi Setliffe is a Scottish-born poet and visual storyteller now based in Tennessee. Her work lives where tenderness meets bone—writing that is gothic, intimate, and unflinching, shaped by survival, motherhood, and the search for safe love after rupture. She writes in haunting images—lantern-light, tides, ghosts, and anchors—building poems that feel like letters you weren’t meant to read, and prayers you don’t know how to say out loud.
Naomi’s poetry explores longing, resilience, and the body as both home and battlefield, threading together themes of protection, desire, grief, and rebirth. With a voice that is both brutal and luminous, she creates work meant to be felt in the chest: cathartic, cinematic, and honest. She shares her poetry on Instagram under the name Nomes Pomes, and is currently developing multiple collections alongside a larger poetry manuscript, continuing to expand her world across page, image, and performance.
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