Paperweight Poetry

There are things that I wish to say,  rotting away in my throat, every day that I do not let them utter their cries, I can taste them slick down my throat,  like an oil sticking and gripping like black mold  floating in a bathtub of basin water already gone cold and every word i say and add and collect  like a museum curator, strikes its match  at the end of my tongue, on the serrated edge of each word and sets this bleak ocean on fire, laughing  in its gloriously orange irony so many words, too many damn feelings, I wish I were an enchanted doll,  pinned and plucked and perfect, placed politely in a glass box for all of eternity,  keep me innocent, small, untaught like strings that don’t know how to knot, because experience only teaches you how to make more fires, with ways other than incomplete sentences and peppered matches, so which agony is worse?  to tell and kill? or to tell and die?  either way, an ocean on fire,  cannot put itself o

My collarbones are my wings they curve with the poise of the sea, white as the foam of its waves these flightless pinions of mine. It is as if we were once creatures purposed for a sky and our wings were sprouting and then they stopped short rounded off into shoulders but I will not let my skin and bones be an excuse for my lack of flight, these are my collarbones, they are powerful, they collect raindrops and moonbeams shaking with laughter and surprise they are sacrificial soldiers breaking in half with the grace of bread broken at communion so that it doesn't break my heart instead, my collarbones are my wings, and they are fearsome, they kiss the tips of my hair and freckled skin like stars, glistening like swords poking out of my chest, daring only the bravest to near, they perch and pitch and rise like silent suns without names, eddies of rose these are my collarbones, they will not yield, they will not part, like the feelings of secondary characters,

I don't know if you've ever seen something absolutely free, it's a rarity in any society, but it looks like a bird that flies, for the pure rapture of using its wings. -anna sluder

It was my childhood that made me old, by the time I was seventeen I was digging up ungodly memories that not even a forty year old would open from their time capsule because even they haven't lived that much you see, I was a flower that grew where it wasn't supposed to like an anachronistic telephone booth in the Middle Ages and then even an anachronistic telephone booth in the twenty first century, maybe I never belonged and maybe that's okay, if belonging is owning but that doesn't mean i was a library book shuffled between the fingers and beds of strangers a thing, anyone could take with a free library card but they did anyways, And they tell you, you, the flowers that grew where they were supposed to in the wombs of mothers who wanted them, in the suburban neighborhoods with potted plants next door to the gentrified coffee shop that uses the same Miracle-Grow, that the system is reassuring words like, safe and secure, they don't tell you t