Paperweight Poetry

No longer can we make light of deaths  No longer can the news stations only report the deaths of white people and their children No longer can we sigh and write them into a statistic No longer can we drink our whiskey upon their coffins like they are coffee tables No longer. No longer.  -anna sluder

Hope isn't a soft beautiful thing It grabs you by the throat Pins you down And says don't give up Don't ever fucking give up. -anna sluder

One moment I see sunshine The next I see a blue tongue  Lolling out of her asphyxiated throat  Out of her hypoxic lips Propped in her chair, yet slightly slumped  With the weight of death and the weight of the bastard who did this Eyes glazed over as if they were glass Hands so stiff and cold you feel as though they might crack if you touch them And she's pale, so pale for her dark skin  Like a porcelain doll with her head tilted back Arms so flat and angled on the arm rests Like a puppet, posed and ready for performance Except for one thing, the blue tongue  The blue tongue that says I didn't get there in time The blue tongue that says she died by asphyxiation,  That she slowly so slowly gasped for breath until  Each inhale went down from twenty breaths per minute to one As her airways narrowed and inflamed with a wheeze  As her lungs stretched, gripping for one more breath  As her neck craned till the veins were pulsing blue to get out of

I wonder what the silk sheets would say  Of the rich white playboy who sleeps in them Would they speak of the blood of the virgins he lures into them To numb the blind ache of his own ignorance?  I wonder what the cotton sheets would say  Of the underpaid laborer who sleeps in them Would they speak of the way his body lays corpselike under the exhaustion  Or would they whisper of how in the night he secretly screams? I wonder what the clods of dirt would say  Of the African child who sleeps in it  Would they speak of the eyes on a scrawny body that can't close Because the gunshots are too loud and the kidnappers too many?  I wonder what the sheets of America would say. I wonder what they would say.  -anna sluder

And then he said let there be light And there was love on the first day And it was good So the humans prodded it, laughed at it, then hugged it They embraced the love, swallowed it, questioned it, and stomped on it  They twisted it, excused it, breathed it, and bled on it And then he let the light implode and end And there was love on the last day And it was good. -anna sluder

Sometimes I feel as though I am the uncomfortable guest of life That I am sitting at the dinner table with Life, Fate, and Destiny And all they can talk about is the infallible stupidity of humans And I as a human, push my meal about the plate with a fork Straining to change the subject as I shift uneasily in my chair But all three of them just howl and laugh Snickering at the ineffective existence  Of my own humanity.  -anna sluder

A nd love was a heartless door And if speaking in right decorum Infatuation was but a door knob  In only the profession of ignorance. -anna sluder

All I could inquire is to live from the heart But yet I find myself only inquiring of others,  If they know anything of it. -anna sluder

And there were the pipe smokers and the writers twirling the idea of love  about their finger like smoke sucking in a dragon's breath for the air here, was too tainted  for the quiet romantics too unclean for the virgins so until someone, stomps on our rose colored glass howling Mazeltov  and preceding to use it to carve out  our eyes I will stay blind and warm in the outlandish belief of tenderness as the batting eyelash of love even when life is cold and crowded with rats I will at least thank the light and I will thank the pipe smokers and the writers for twirling me about their finger like smoke for in the name of celibate hope questioning love is believing in it.  -anna sluder