No Man

I am not a library book
and you are not a child collecting a stamp collection in the pages of me,
to hand-off to your friends like a football in the virtual pixels of your fantasy league,
and cross me off your bracket with the easiness of devouring a six pack during Shark Week.
I am not a sword for you to swallow
a white whale,
a circus act for you to master.
I am not bread for you to burn the edges of,
and feed me to the ducks because i could not be groomed palatable enough for your consumption.
I am not your blood bank,
not your goth girlfriend to suck the neck of  like a teenage vampire romance
not the universal donor to your every need,
the feeding tube, the surgeon, and the wound that you complain about.
I am not your edgy, carries a lighter but doesn't smoke soul-fixer
to teach you the term socialism off of a flash card.
I will not peel you open gently like a papaya, to expose the fleshy and soft parts of you to the world
and sit on my knees like a quiet catholic schoolgirl and swallow the seeds.
I am not your right, your open season in maritime law,
I owe no man a rib, my existence;
just as I owe no sun for making me warm
or tree for letting me breathe.
So dear men,
despite what you and your phallus may think,
you have nothing on me.


-anna sluder 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Time present time

I stand on my toes, on a box, on top of a wheeled chair to reach the clock high above me, so that I can cut the whiskers of it off with a pair of gardening scissors. But I hear a knock at the door and it is present standing in the way holding a fish, she hands it to me, so I ask her what to do with it, she tells me she knows that everything the birds say really matters to me that she knows that I count and store every breath that the trees release, in an empty peanut butter jar under my bed, but that I could not remember my first cold water, there was no recollection of my first bright moon. She tells me to hold the fish and decide what it means to me in terms of love, so that I will remember when I leave this room, and when I go to sleep, that I once loved something new, and small, and grey, and something that had scales and looked nothing like me, and I didn’t know where it came from or where it would go from there, but that that di
Read more

Green

I stand in the door wanting nothing, but to be a part of the little house we built of medium-rare earth and broken eggshells and wriggly worms, the bedroom walls are green and there is a single thought tactfully pinned to its center. I remember that everything is quieter in green, and to find solace in the silent ecstasy of the earth’s preeminent color, to excavate and toss away all the colors until we reach the obvious, that green is the walls, and green is earth, and earth reclaims buildings slowly over time with moss then ivy, then as the buildings dilapidate and become their own graves in gardens of decay, it swallows them whole, like swamps and quicksand I thought would play a much larger role in my girlhood battles than they did. I want to crawl inside of the little house we built and play in the dirt with the worms, I want to be reclaimed by terra cotta clay and tunnels made by ants, and if I need to, I’ll send a note to the green,
Read more

The Only Future I See

I am afraid to make today my home, I am afraid to buy pillows in the comfort of this moment, so I try to imagine the future, I like to think that it is a road lined with flowers in the colors of my youth, but there are no flowers, I don’t even think that if there is a road, it is lined with commas. When I dare my mind to try to imagine the future, I only see myself, no bills, no house, no job, no person, no plan, just myself standing in a field of baby green ampersands, cutting my hair and then holding a small bird, and the bird doesn’t sing for me,  as I promised I would never ask it to, it just stays alive beside me. So most days we break apart plums with our fingers like stories, and we make each day, each plum our home, and we are perfect and we are whole in this interval of quiet, where the sun is the only one who gets to see. -anna sluder
Read more