Paperweight Poetry

Tell me about the dream, the dream you fold up like origami paper cranes and store in the soft space behind your kneecaps, tell me what it smells like, I imagine it's like strawberry wine and smoke, a little rough around the edges, the taste of a backstage parlour in a stripper's joint, where the women pull purple wigs over their hair and dance like wild flames, but I want to hear what it sounds like, rain on a city window, two unlikely things. Tell me what you hide beneath your kneecaps, what you tuck away in those crossed elbows, are you dreaming? let me run my hand over your visions like a child galloping through stalks and straw, her fingers strumming the untrimmed weeds as she pushes past with the weight and force of water, and tell me what it means. Because we all do what we can to make it, and we forget how dreams can taste like morning tea and cream. -anna sluder 

Come back to me like sun meets horizon and river rushes to meet shore. The earth brims with great and tragic lovers, and we should imitate them all. To live as old and as wild as the hippie moon come back to me, like humans always drawn back to the universe tethered to their ships like umbilical cords if only they let go, let the gaping mouth of a galaxy swallow them whole maybe we'd know, that love transcends time and space, it eclipses a measly sun kissing a hundredth horizon, a river rushing to a shore. So come back to me, like humans come to chaos and in the bellies of each universe, we will fall in love, over and over and over again. -anna sluder

And yet I picked up my decapitated limbs, and used them, to build a bridge back to you. -anna sluder

Have fun trying to quantify everything, for while you're at the drawing board puzzled at the make of the stars I'll be undressing on an isolated shore, on the southside of France dragging my feet slowly and methodically through the warm, burning sand letting the starlit tide kiss my toes like a worshipper, I will pitch forward and slide into the indigo the surface continuous with the skin on my back, the sea just one large body, and I'm just a pore of skin adding to it, but to be a part of something so blue and so right, watching the stars crystallizing over a sky I couldn't feel more whole, than right here, wading with the universe. And perhaps one day, you'll buy that plane ticket and join me and my pruned hands when you realize that all you've got is your equations, and I've got my heart. -anna sluder

Either we are terrified that this enigma of thoughts and words we spill like blood and ink and ink and blood are certifiable, or they are right but no soul wishes to point truth out in the courtroom, for she is best friends with revenge; So call me crazy, but I will say it, you are right and you are good. You have a heart and a mind that are only eighteen inches apart, and your lips are the medium in between and I know you can say it, so tell me, Tell the world what they censor out of the literature, but they cannot employ police upon your tongue for, and what it is they ban and burn and fight is what happened to you. So tell the world what happened and tell the doctor where it hurts, and if any of you are brave enough to follow, I will herby call you the ones who dared to live; And to you I just want to say, you're beautiful. -anna sluder

I saw a bird sit on a pipe one evening all alone and watch the sun set like a bursting and bleeding ulcer that pulses then was drained of its blood and like a child put to rest after he weeps, for the tears like warm milk, always put them to sleep, I drew myself a bath watched the bird from the window, stay even after the show after the sun had set and the credits had rolled, and then, and only then did I slide under the surface like a callus you had grown used to, and believed in God. -anna sluder