Paperweight Poetry

We drink up half a mind gargle on it like mouthwash just to spit it back out. He calls you a tease but so is he, we are all shaking, for if thunder is a show, we all have to be; dark water dribbles over our lips, scholars call them fallacies, but we call this normal, as if normal is safety pins closing our cleavage and gaps, as if normal is anything other than a dryer setting, and here in a world with guises and surmises vinegar tastes like an 'I don't know' so they defend to their deaths thoughts that are only guesses; I dream of a world where people say what they feel, where it's okay to not be okay, because she's not okay, and maybe you aren't either, so drink me up, drink up all of my mind and all I have to say, and tell me something real, even if it's just the silence. -anna sluder

Seventeen year old love is like a cult, it is you slipping your hand under my shirt, whispering that you’re just undoing my bra as you grope my ribcage, plucking each rib out, for its easier than just asking for my heart, you wrap my breast tissue around and around your fingers  like avarice spinning straw into gold, you tie each of my ribs together with it and use as a ladder to climb up to my heart, payback for the one less rib you have,  that for some reason it inclines you to believe  that sacrifice equals debt, that your ancestors’ kindness is just another way to own me, your fingers run like confused rain up my aorta, and watch as I shake without consent. I loved you and then you played cat’s cradle with my heartstrings;  seventeen year old love is a cult and you’re a master manipulator,  a lunatic who watched a youtube tutorial on  how to become a sage, and taught me that nice girl means easy, nice girl does this nice girl does that

Clean, clean, clean is the hospital in my mouth with its starch, square gowns, unforgiving off-white floors that stiffen your feet that were once so accepted in your bed like a tundra spoon on a wet warm tongue things that sound like construction tools graze my cheeks and rubber fingers, artificial on my teeth. Noises are so different for me now; mirages, that sound like a hybrid of a buzz saw and a hatchet, but really they make me clean, clean, clean but maybe I want to be crooked, maybe I want yellow and black piano keys rotting ivory, decayed by laughter and life gaps as wide as parking spaces maybe I want to be everything you don’t want. Because noises are so different now; the people are so different now they’re all clean, clean, clean. -anna sluder

The ground beneath my feet is what you said you'd be, tenacious and unable to shake, but you aren't a god, and words are just drops of a thought, promises, just a vague memory of hope, so I have much to fear and much to deny if you swear you are my ground that doesn't break especially if you haven't heard of an earthquake and the humanity that will only ever get to try. For everything constant is always a lie. -anna sluder